The Red Valkyrie
by Catsy
Summary: Kadyn and Camilla continue their adventures in Aincrad three months after the events of The Unraveling, contending with the consequences of their actions and the impact of having a reputation that precedes them. First-person OC viewpoint but fits within canon. Canon characters include: The Black Cats, Thinker, Yurielle
1. The Story So Far

**Author's foreword (updated 11/5/2012): this story is a sequel to the "origin" story for Kadyn and Camilla, called The Unraveling. You can find it by clicking my username in the headers above. If you haven't read that story yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. You can enjoy The Red Valkyrie without having read it, but as with coming into any story with previously-established characters, you'll miss out on quite a bit of the details.**

**If you have read The Unraveling, thank you! You may choose to skip this prologue chapter if you like. While there is a little bit of new information about what became of Kadyn and Camilla following the events of that story, it is primarily here for the benefit of those who haven't read the story of their first month in the game.**

**If you'd like to see a map of the 11th floor as depicted in The Red Valkyrie, go to the following address:**

**ayashi dot net/foo/sao/AincradFloor11 dot png**

**You'll have to put the URL together yourself due to the ridiculously draconian degree to which FFN's filter strips even non-linked or obfuscated domain names—just remove the spaces and replace "dot" with a period).**

**Thanks for reading, and please leave feedback!**

* * *

On November 6th, 2022, a visionary genius named Kayaba Akihito trapped the minds of ten thousand players inside a VRMMORPG called _Sword Art Online_ on the day of its launch. The rules he set out were as merciless as they were fair: players were unable to log themselves out of the game from within, and any outside attempt to tamper with the NerveGear virtual reality helmet or sever their connection to the game servers would cause the NerveGear to immediately destroy their brain with powerful electromagnetic signals. The device would also kill the player if their character's hit points dropped to zero, making survival within the game literally a matter of life and death for those trapped.

My name is Seiji Midorikawa. My wife Rebecca and I—using our longtime character names of Camilla and Kadyn, respectively—were two of the players imprisoned within this Death Game, within the floating castle of Aincrad that constituted the game world of _Sword Art Online_.

According to the euphemistically-named "tutorial" given by Kayaba on the game's opening day, the only way to escape from the game was to clear all hundred floors and defeat the final boss. It was a feat which the 1,000 lucky beta testers hadn't even come close to doing during SAO's closed beta period; they hadn't even cleared the tenth floor.

But in those first dark days, there was at least one man who believed that it could be done: an idealistic self-styled "knight" named Diabel. He had a force of personality that inspired others to follow him, and he made us believe in the geas he'd lain upon himself to find and clear the first floor boss—an accomplishment he believed would send a message to all players that _this game could be cleared_. That they need not despair, but should fight to strengthen themselves and win freedom for all of those trapped within this world.

Although we leveled up rapidly during our long quest with Diabel to reach the boss dungeon of the first floor, we took a long hiatus from adventuring following a harrowing encounter with a group of criminals who were intent on exacting revenge upon my wife—revenge based on an inaccurate rumor that she'd taken out a PKer. We'd driven them off—but not before the lives of three party members were lost, deaths for which Camilla blamed herself. It had also cost her a piece of herself, a part of her soul that she felt like she lost when she brutally executed a captive PKer after the battle.

Four weeks into the game, two thousand players had perished without clearing the first floor. Despair was widespread. Then on December 3rd, we bid goodbye to our friend Diabel the night before he led a raid party of 44 players on a successful quest to defeat the first-floor boss. The victory cost him his life, but won us all a renewed reason for hope: if the first floor could be cleared, everyone had reason to believe that winning our freedom from Aincrad was truly possible.

In less than two weeks, the second floor was cleared as well. Then the third, and more still—now that so many players were leveling up and inspired by success, some floors fell in as little as a day. It was as if the floodgates had been opened, the victory over Illfang the Kobold Lord at the top of the first floor dungeon a battle cry that drove the front-line players to burn through many of the early floors that followed as if they were filled with trash mobs.

We were not among them, and we quickly fell behind the front-line players in level. As a duo, there was a limit to the kinds of risks we were able to take, and the scars of betrayal and loss from our previous experiences made it difficult to trust others. We occasionally partied with another friend from early in the game, a wise and skilled axe-wielder named Agil—but he was among the very select few to whom we were willing to entrust our lives. Before long he, too, outleveled us and spent more time on the higher floors. After that, most of the time it was just the two of us.

In truth, we were okay with that. As shut-in gamers who had been playing together online for more than a decade, we'd lived a fairly isolated and insular life in each other's company even before being trapped in SAO. Fighting for our lives side by side almost every day for over four months had only brought us closer still.

In contrast to the despair and uncertainty of our first month in this world, for some time I'd found myself thinking that—all things considered—life could be a lot worse.

I was right.


	2. Mugging

**March 16th, 2023  
Aincrad 11th Floor: The Taft Foothills**

"In case you were wondering," said the bandit in what almost passed for a friendly tone, leaning casually on the pommel of his war hammer as if it was a fashion accessory, "this is the part where you start pissing yourselves and dropping all of that sweet gear you've got."

"You must be dumber than you look," said my wife with the characteristic diplomacy she displayed when facing orange players—that is, players who had orange cursors rather than green due to having committed a crime. "Our avatars in this game don't excrete waste."

As the man with the war hammer scowled at the insult and opened his mouth to reply, a second—a tall woman with a short-cropped head of sandy brown hair—leaned on the shaft of her spear as she started laughing. "Would you listen to her, Mallek? This _gaijin_ lady thinks pretending she's from Osaka will scare us off."

She was referring to the fact that my wife—an American by birth—had learned Japanese from a teacher from that region, and had absorbed a considerable amount of his accent and speech patterns over a period of years. Her accent wasn't as strong as it had been due to our ten years of marriage living together in my hometown of Chiba, but despite the fact that she was perfectly fluent in the language, the flavor of the Kansai region was an indelible part of her speech and probably always would be.

It was also a subject about which she could be extremely touchy, and as I held my dagger at ready to help discourage the bandits from trying to jump us, I privately thought that they'd just made their second mistake. It was a mistake compounded further by what the third bandit, a younger man with a blue steel short sword, said next.

"No names, damnit! Look you two, just give it up—you're outnumbered three to two. We don't wanna hurt you, but we will if you don't shut up and show some sense. Give us your stuff and you walk."

The expression in Camilla's blue eyes was as icy cold as their color as she tracked her coal-black longsword—held out 45 degrees in front of her—in a slow, repeating semicircle to face each of the three bandits who were trying to shake us down. "Okay," she said, a slow smile starting to creep across her face. It was a smile I knew from long experience had absolutely _nothing_ to do with mirth. "Let's clear the air here. Until now, you three have probably been able to make a living by mugging the parties of low-level players who hunt this area. We're usually ten floors above here; we're hunting here for upgrade materials. We may be outnumbered, but you're outclassed. And out of—"

"Are you crazy, lady?" yelled the hammer user, hefting his weapon and waving it in what I supposed was intended to be an intimidating way. "Do you and your buddy want to die here?" Despite his brainless bravado, the other two were starting to look a little uneasy.

"And out of the five of us standing here," Camilla continued in a deceptively quiet tone as she half-spun and leveled her sword directly at the hammer-wielding bandit, her hair coming to rest across her left pauldron like a flame-red waterfall, "I'm betting I'm the only one who has actually ever taken a life. _Chau?_"

Dead silence.

"Like pretty much every other orange piece of shit in this game," she went on, "you're not PKs. Almost nobody who thinks they are really is—I know; I've fought the real thing and won. You're just parasites, and you tried to jump on the wrong animal today."

"Mallek…" began the swordsman nervously, breaking his own rule about mentioning names.

"Shut up!" the hammer wielder shot back, glaring at Camilla and then me. I did my best to glare back. She'd always been better at this intimidation thing, but I could certainly put on a good glare when I was being mugged. Of course, being outfitted in heavy plate armor didn't hurt my wife's intimidation factor. Most of the bandits were wearing leather or mismatched pieces of light plate.

"I'm going to count to three," Camilla said, her gaze locked with Mallek's. "If you're gone by three, _you_ are the ones who get to walk away from this. If any of you are still in my sight when I finish counting, your life expectancy is going to start dropping very quickly."

The swordsman was gone before she finished speaking, the rustling of bushes and the profanities the hammer user screamed after him the only sign he'd ever been there. The woman was pale.

"One."

"Goddamnit Mallek!" yelled the woman with the spear, fear plain on her face. "Don't be an idiot! Let's go!"

"Two." Camilla's sword began to glow with a blue light that matched her eyes.

"Mallek!" This time it was almost a shriek. _Why doesn't she run?_ I wondered. _She doesn't want to be here. She has at least _some_ sense. Run, lady. Get out of here!_ I silently willed her to listen.

"Make your choice, Mallek," I said evenly, keeping my eye on the female bandit—she was closest to me.

"Three," said Camilla mildly, and then attacked.

Her sword traced a crescent moon of blue through the air and struck the bandit's war hammer with a bright flash and a sound like a grenade going off. A chunk of his HP bar, perhaps as much as a tenth of it, was lost simply blocking the attack. The bandit with the spear yelled for Mallek again and started to rush at Camilla, but stopped when she saw me block her path and drop into a defensive stance. The woman set her lips in a line and thrust the spear at me—not a technique; more likely intended to make me jump aside and move out of her way.

Now, I wouldn't call myself any kind of accomplished martial artist, but I did take some mixed-style classes for a few years. One of the things we used to do for fun once a week was practice barehanded disarm techniques against various weapons: _bokken_, staves, and the like. To be honest, it was my favorite part of the class.

A spear wasn't all that different from a staff—just sharper at one end. When she jabbed the spear at me, slightly overextending herself, some old bit of training must have asserted itself. I dropped my dagger to free up both hands and then grabbed the haft of the spear, yanking it towards and past me as I twisted my hips. She staggered forwards as she held on to the shaft, off-balance, and to complete the disarm I jabbed the spear back at the opposite side of her body from which she'd been holding it, using my position of superior leverage to put her further off-balance.

At that point she had two choices: keep holding onto the spear and fall, or let go. She took the smarter option and let go, and when she did I jabbed her in the face with the butt of her own weapon. It did almost no damage to her HP gauge, but she cried out from surprise and the sudden sensation of numbness—there was no real pain from combat in SAO, just a numb feeling that scaled with the force of the impact and the damage done—and lost her balance, hands going to her face as she fell to the ground. I reversed the spear and held the point about a few centimeters from her throat. "Don't," I said, trying to sound cold. In truth, I really didn't want to do it, and wasn't altogether sure I could. But either she was already terrified or I must've really sold it, because she froze in place, looking desperately over at where Camilla was whittling down Mallek's HP simply through the blocking damage that soaked through his defense. Hammers were not particularly good at defending, and my wife used her longsword like an extension of herself. It was beautiful to watch—when we weren't in a life or death situation or afraid for each other's lives.

Something clicked in my head, and I looked down at the female bandit I held at spearpoint. "Your lover?" I asked. Her eyes widened even further for a moment, and then she nodded vigorously.

"Camilla," I called—not quite yelling, but pitching my voice to carry over the din of metal on metal.

"Busy, dear," she said offhandedly as she delivered a solid blow with her shield that brought the bandit's HP gauge into the yellow.

I sighed. "Camilla, try not to kill him. They're _together_."

I couldn't see her expression from where I stood, but she stopped pressing her attack for just a moment. "That's really up to him," she said in the same casual tone as before. Glancing at the HUD in the upper left of my peripheral vision, I noticed that she'd barely lost any HP; in all likelihood she was just _playing_ with this guy. I briefly wondered just what level these two actually were. Both Camilla and I had just hit 20; chances were good they were quite a bit lower if the 11th floor was their usual hunting grounds.

"Mallek, please!" the woman begged, the spear still at her throat.

Mallek's eyes darted towards where the woman lay before me. "Viyami!" he yelled suddenly. "You bastard, don't you _dare_—"

"Oh _shut the fuck up_," I said in a sudden rush of anger. Camilla wasn't attacking any more, but her sword and shield were held at ready, the black blade beginning to emit a lambent red glow with the beginning of a technique.

"You've got some real _nerve_," I spat sharply, "dragging your girlfriend into this and then telling me _I'm_ the bastard when your attempted mugging goes badly wrong. Now drop it." I didn't touch Viyami's throat with the spear, but the implication was hard to miss.

"Better do what my husband says," Camilla added with acidic sweetness and the same predatory smile she'd shown earlier. She held the sword in an overhand stance with her shield out, the tip of the blade pointed over her head and directly at her opponent. The red light raged now, running up and down the length of the sword as if begging to be released.

With a look of frustrated anger, he complied, throwing the war hammer to the ground like a spiked football in the American version of the sport. I lifted the spear and extended a hand to the bandit I'd been holding prisoner to help her up. Maybe it was sexist of me—Camilla sometimes said so—but I had a hard time being truly _mean_ to women, even in this game. It just wasn't in me. Her expression of terror quickly turned to wary hope as I used the butt of the spear to give her a light shove on the back, pushing her in the direction of the other bandit. She ran towards him and hugged him fiercely. Then she took a step back and slapped him, leaving a red mark on his cheek and a stunned look on his face. "Mallek, you asshole! You almost got us both killed!"

"I suggest a new line of work," Camilla remarked archly. "We'll be keeping these weapons. Now get the hell out of here before I change my mind."

Viyami gave me a brief look of what seemed like gratitude as she and Mallek quickly fled the scene. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding—and since our avatars didn't require oxygen, making breathing more of an affectation or habitual emotional response than anything else, I'd probably been holding it the whole fight.

Camilla gave a grimace as she looked at the stats on the war hammer and stowed it in her inventory. "What a piece of vendor trash. No wonder he wasn't doing any real damage even when he hit me."

"I really have to wonder how they've lived this long. That guy isn't the sharpest tool in the shed."

My wife laughed, pushing the spear out of the way so she could hug me. "By hunting those weaker than them. Which is a job description I somehow suspect Miss Viyami isn't going to be on board with after this. You did great, love."

We rubbed noses for a moment and then separated. "I honestly thought you were going to kill him," I said in a different tone.

"I would've," she replied in much the same tone. Her eyes got a slightly distant look—unusual for her; _I've_ always been the one with a tendency to get lost in my daydreams, a state that my wife indulgently and affectionately called "going to the land of the Forest Elves". After a moment I realized she was probably flashing back to our close call with a sadistic group of actual PKers—the only _real_ ones we've ever met so far, thankfully—to the murder of three friends at their hands, and to the end of it all when she had brutally executed Kindalosh, the party member who'd gone orange and betrayed us to the PKers.

She squeezed her eyes shut suddenly and shook her head in a dismissive motion. "I wasn't going all-out, you know."

"I know," I said more gently. "You would've cut him down in half the time if you'd used all of your sword skills and attacked as quickly as I know you can."

"I didn't _really_ want to kill him," she said quietly. "But I would've if he'd made me do it."

Ever since the aftermath, Camilla rarely talked about that day. I couldn't blame her for avoiding the subject. Something dark and ugly had emerged from her soul as she'd stood there holding Kindalosh at swordpoint, something that had broken its chains when he'd made a smug remark about the prospect of going to the prison in Black Iron Castle rather than being killed outright. She'd shoved the sword down through the gap between his throat and his collarbone and all the way down through his body… and held it there until he died.

And then she'd broken down in hysterics over what she'd done and the people we'd lost, and taken a very long time to come back from the fugue of shame and anguish into which she'd fallen.

But that part inside her that was made of cold steel, that had allowed her to execute a traitor and look into his eyes as his avatar shattered… I had an uncomfortable feeling that it was inextricably linked to the inner strength that had helped keep us alive all these months. My wife had always been the _yang_ in our relationship; something that I'd made my peace with a long time ago and even come to love about her. And love… well, part of it was taking the bad with the good and loving the whole of the person.

Besides, like most people I had my own share of inner demons. And a new one had begun to gnaw at me ever since this one-sided battle with the bandits.

A long silence stretched between us as I got lost in my own thoughts. Abruptly I realized how to put into words what it was that was eating at me. "I don't know if I could've killed the female bandit if I'd had to, especially not once I'd disarmed her." Somehow, it felt like if I didn't use Viyami's name it'd help me think of her more impersonally. I looked directly into Camilla's eyes and segued to my concern. "And I'm not really comfortable with the way I threatened her to get the other bandit to stand down."

Blue eyes held mine unwaveringly for a few seconds as she thought that over. "And what if she'd tried to get the drop on you and forced you to hurt her?"

"That's different," I said, starting to walk alongside my wife in the direction of Taft proper as we headed out. "If she'd attacked me, I would've been defending myself—or defending you, for that matter. But she was disarmed, and I had her own spear held at her throat."

"That was nicely done, by the way—I caught it when Mallek and I were circling each other."

"Thanks."

"So what if he hadn't stood down?" Camilla asked directly.

That, there, was the real question. I'd implicitly threatened Mallek that I'd put the spear through Viyami's throat if he didn't disarm himself. That was it in a nutshell, and I didn't like what it said about me.

"I don't know," I admitted. "If that hadn't gotten him to back down, he obviously wouldn't have cared enough about her for killing her to be any kind of retribution. It would've been a pointless death. It would've been punishing _her_ for his stupidity. No…" I shook my head. "I'm sorry, Camilla. I don't think I could've done it. It was an empty threat, and I feel like I sunk to some kind of low even by making it."

"By using their feelings for each other as a weapon," she said.

I stopped in my tracks, Camilla halting beside me and looking at the expression on my face, which must've been pale. That was it exactly.

"I keep thinking back to _that_ day, when I thought those PKers were going to kill you there right in front of me, and how I felt then… and I feel like I've just given myself something in common with them. It makes me sick."

We were lucky we'd already cleared this area right before the attempted mugging; I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings and I hadn't been scanning for mobs. My wife took a step towards me and just hugged me for a moment before drawing back and giving me a reassuring kiss. "You are _nothing_ like them, Kadyn. _Nothing._ But consider this: if you hadn't made that threat, do you think Mallek would've given up on his own? Was it better that you threatened her and they both lived, or would you have rather held your tongue and let Mallek fight to the death?"

I didn't have an answer to that. It gnawed at me all the way back to town.


	3. Quest Giver

As trees started to thin out and reveal the lights of Taft in the distance, Camilla and I began to relax, the silence that had held while we passed through an area where it was possible mobs had respawned lifting and returning our conversation to the unexpected conflict with the three inept bandits.

"Why did you tell them we usually played ten floors above this one? Our usual stomping grounds are 16 and 17."

Camilla gave me that look that usually meant I'd asked a fairly dense question. "What's scarier to you: facing down a player who's usually ten floors above you, or one who's usually only five or six floors above?"

"Oh." It _had_ been a dumb question. In truth, we probably could've been grinding on the 21st floor at our level, if we'd been in a strong party—but as a duo we typically stuck with the relatively easy quests and field mobs on lower floors. We didn't dare come anywhere near the front lines except to visit the towns when the warp gates first opened.

What she _had_ been completely truthful about was our purpose for being here on the 11th floor: upgrade materials. While we walked I checked our shared inventory; as a married couple in-game we didn't have separate item storage. "Almost a full stack of Foothills Badger Teeth. You sure you don't want to stay out just a little longer?"

Camilla nodded. "Home, please. And food. If I have to look at one more Foothills Badger today, I'm going to…" She trailed off as if she'd been trying to come up with some witty way to end that sentence but just couldn't muster even that much enthusiasm. It was hard to blame her; we'd been doing nothing but pulling badgers and waiting for repops since sun-up. Getting mugged had almost been a welcome distraction.

"So what you are saying," I ventured carefully in English after a moment to think over the wording, "is that you do not need no more stinking—"

"Don't make me _hurt_ you_._" It would've been a more credible threat if she hadn't been trying to stop herself from laughing while she bumped me with her hip. Yielding to her desire to call it a day, we walked the rest of the way home arm in arm.

Home, in this case, was currently one of the inns in Taft, a smallish city on the 11th floor that was more like a large town. Despite its size, it had a warp gate and at least one of every type of NPC vendor; it was a popular place for lower-level players to settle. Having no permanent home, we tended to rent rooms wherever we happened to be hunting, although we'd been scouring the 16th floor for so long that we actually kept a rented room on the second floor above a bakery there, even after we leveled up enough to start venturing into 17.

We got a few curious stares as we entered the small pub next to the inn where we were renting an upstairs room. After four days in Taft, we were used to getting looks from the players who made this their primary home, although it still made me a little uncomfortable.

"You really should unequip your shield and pauldrons once we hit town," I remarked quietly to her as we found a seat. "It's really obvious that they're rare drops from a higher floor, and they draw attention."

"So?" asked Camilla, raising a hand to signal for the waitress—an actual _player_ waitress who must've either invested money or done some kind of crafting quest to get the job. It still never ceased to amaze me when I met a player with a non-combat profession, even though Camilla and I had once spent almost a week playing at being "civilians" ourselves.

"I'm okay with being marked as someone from a higher floor," my wife went on. "Especially if it makes people take us more seriously. If those bandits from earlier had had more than two brain cells to share between the three of them, we might not have had to fight them off."

"Welcome back," said the waitress as she approached our table with a customer service smile that might have even been genuine. She opened a note-taking window in the air in front of her and pushed a few locks of light purple hair out of her face. "What can I get you two tonight?"

It was nice being remembered—NPCs had no memory unless they were part of a quest you were on, and would utter the same set of rote phrases every time you did business with them. Camilla spoke first. "You still got coffee here?"

"Darn right we do," said the girl with a wink, scratching a note in her window. "Only coffee for two floors in either direction; my friend Parida has high-level Cooking and makes it herself."

"Out_standing_," my wife said, stretching both arms out high above her head in a very catlike way. It was delightful to watch. "I can see why people like to live here. Cup of that, plus whatever soup you've got today."

"You got it hon," the waitress replied. "What about you, sir?"

"That green tea you had last night—still available?"

The waitress bowed in apology. "I'm sorry sir; that batch took the last of the ingredients and we don't have any more."

"Now I know why it was so expensive," I remarked in good humor. "Water's fine for me then, plus I guess I'll take the soup too."

"Coming right up!" the girl said once we paid for our order, sweeping her notes window closed and twirling her frilly green skirt as she turned to go. "Parida!" she called out as she opened the door to the kitchen. "Coffee and two soups!"

I chuckled, prodding Camilla in the shin under the table with the toe of my boot. "You and your coffee."

"I keep telling you, Kadyn," she said, chin resting in the palm of one hand with her elbow propped up on the table. She fluttered her eyelashes theatrically, fooling no one. "I would love you forever if you took Cooking and leveled it up."

"You love me forever anyway."

"Yes, but I'd love you _more_."

"Not if I figured out a way to make _nattou_."

Camilla's eyelash fluttering ceased abruptly; she looked daggers at me across the table. "You _wouldn't_."

"I so would."

"I'm armed," she warned.

"So am I."

"Mine's bigger."

Having no way to respond to that, I pulled down my eyelid and stuck out my tongue just as the waitress came back—which caused her to embark on a valiant struggle not to laugh while carrying our food. Feeling ravenous, we both declared a truce on the subject of _nattou_ and dug in. We knew, intellectually, that the hunger and thirst we felt had nothing to do with what our real bodies felt in the real world. But what we _felt_ was quite real to us, and although we wouldn't die of thirst or hunger in this world, it got extremely uncomfortable after a while.

Besides, food was one of life's great pleasures, and most of the food in Aincrad that wasn't horrible was either very expensive, player-made, or both. Early on we'd gotten by with the godawful basic rations you could get for a few Col and occasionally splurged on really nice food at inns, but after a few months we'd started earning enough money to justify food as a luxury item rather than as basic sustenance.

"I should cut my hair," Camilla said suddenly after we finished our soups.

I blinked in surprise at the complete non sequitur, patting my mouth with a napkin. "What brought that on? It's not like it grows in here."

"No, but sometimes it really gets in the way during battle, even if I tie it. Once I even got a few strands caught in the joints of my armor, and that was… attention-getting."

"It's not like that could've hurt," I pointed out.

"No, but like I said: attention-getting." She drained the last of her coffee and gave me an expectant look.

"I _like_ your long hair," I said after a moment. "I always have."

"I know. But things are different now. It's impractical. Besides, if I change my mind it's not like I have to spend a year growing it out again—I'll just go to an NPC stylist and reset my hairstyle to my avatar's default."

That wasn't a cheap option, especially if you wanted something fancy—but I had to admit, she was right about not having to grow it back out. "Up to you, Cami," I said finally.

"Yes, yes it is… but I wanted to talk to you about it first anyway." For all that we bantered sometimes about the little things, when it came right down to it we were a team—and we consulted each other, even on things like this. I appreciated it, and I smiled across the table to let her know that I did.

"Just please, no shorter than chin length?"

"Deal," she said, smiling as well.

"You guys all done here?" asked the waitress as she returned, gathering up our dishes when we nodded. Then as she was about to leave, she hesitated, a pensive look coming across her features. "Um, I apologize for eavesdropping, but I heard what you said earlier about fighting bandits. Is that true?"

It was a completely unexpected question. Camilla paused with her mouth half-open, taken aback. "It's true," I said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

The waitress set the dishes back down and folded her arms across her chest, looking more troubled. "Well it's just… the orange players around here are kind of strong. It's gotten to be a real problem."

Now Camilla and I exchanged a look of surprise. The bandits we'd driven off earlier had been remarkably weak—I would've been very surprised if they were much more than level 12 or so on average.

I suddenly made a connection and started laughing, half-expecting a glowing question mark to appear over the player's head. "Are you… are you offering us a quest?"

Both Camilla and the waitress laughed too, although the latter's laughter was a little forced. "Not really," she said, nervously tugging at a lock of her hair. "At least, nothing that'll show up in your quest log. But… I mentioned my friend Parida, right? She has to go gather the ingredients we need here, and although she's high enough to do that safely on this floor, she's been robbed by orange players twice now—the second time, they actually _attacked_ her, and she's not the only one that's happened to."

We could understand the tone of horrified disbelief with which she disclosed that last fact. Despite our experience with those murderers in the first floor dungeon, actual player-killing was extremely rare, almost unheard of—or if it wasn't, it was at least being done discreetly enough that everyone assumed that the missing players died in PvM combat. Most orange players we'd come across were more or less like the ones we'd met earlier: thieves who didn't really have the stomach for murder, who relied on numbers and the _threat _of violence being enough to get what they wanted.

"What are you asking us to do?" I inquired.

"Well, you two are probably kinda high-level for this floor, right?" When we both nodded cautiously, not revealing our actual levels, the waitress sighed happily and gave us a deep bow. "If you would be willing, I ask you to accompany Parida while she goes out and gathers ingredients. We can pay you, I promise."

I turned to look at my wife. She groaned and palmed her face. "Kadyn, you _know_ how much I hate escort quests."

"Yeah, but it's not like we're talking about an NPC with crappy AI or pathing that's going to draw aggro or fail the mission. It's a player who I'd hope has something resembling a sense of self-preservation. It'd be more like a pickup group."

"And you _know_ how much I hate pickup groups."

She had me there—we both did. Partying with random players we didn't know had typically not ended well for us in SAO.

"I'm sorry to bother you," said the waitress, still bowed and sounding chastened. She straightened and started to gather the dishes. "Please forgive me for intruding on your meal."

"Wait," I said quickly, holding up a hand. "We'd have to meet your friend before we agreed to do anything."

"Really?" said the purple-haired girl, her demeanor brightening once again. "I mean, you'll at least consider it?"

I gave me wife a look. The one she gave me in response said that we might well be having a private discussion about this later. "We'll listen," I said. "That's all we can promise. You yelled for her earlier—she's back in the kitchen, right? Send her out."

Parida turned out to be a tall, solidly-built woman perhaps a few years younger than us—maybe mid-20's or so. Her very long dark brown hair was kept in a series of elaborate decorative braids, and she was wearing a chef's apron over a short-sleeved tan blouse and an ankle-length dress the same color as her hair. Her bow was deeply respectful as she approached our table. "Hinami told me you'd consider going out with me to gather ingredients in case bandits came along. I can't thank you enough for even hearing me out."

"Please," Camilla said, her previous reluctance either concealed or gone. "Sit down and tell us what's going on."

"First of all," Parida said as she seated herself, "thank you both for your business as well. We've been struggling ever since the bandit problem got worse—I've been afraid to go out ever since the last attack, and our stock of ingredients is getting low."

"Even for the coffee?" Camilla asked in alarm.

"_Camilla_."

"Especially for the coffee," Parida replied, seeming to miss the significance of the byplay. "I have to buy the Cryfern Stems from someone on the 15th floor anyway, but I can only find Pillflower Seeds in Weilan's Marsh on the other side of the Foothills."

"Isn't there anyone else you can ask?" Camilla said. "Someone local, better known to you?"

Parida pursed her lips, brow wrinkling. "There's a small guild that eats here sometimes, but I don't know how strong they are and I'm afraid to ask—it's rude. Hinami said she overheard you talking about fighting off bandits around here. If you're strong enough to do that… I'd be willing to pay you to protect me."

"How much?" I asked.

Parida named a price. I saw my wife try not to react—it was a fair daily wage for what might well be an entirely uneventful escort task. Bandits who felt free to gang up on a single player might think twice about taking on an armed party of three.

As if hearing my thoughts, Parida added, "Just having you along might be enough to discourage them from trying anything."

"Can you fight?" Camilla asked. That was not a trivial question; discouraging bandits from attacking was one thing, but we couldn't be babysitters.

Parida nodded. "I'm no slouch—I can use a staff and I've got my own equipment. I still have to be able to fight the monsters around this area to go gather, and I'm high enough level to do that. I just can't stand up to a group of hostile players."

"So why not go out with a party?" my wife asked. I nodded. I'd been wondering the same thing.

Parida gave her a bitter smile. "If we went out as a party to farm monsters and level up, would you want to keep stopping all the time so I could gather ingredients?"

"No," both of us said at once. Parida spread her hands.

"So I need to hire someone. I humbly ask you to please consider my request."

Exchanging another look with me, Camilla drummed her fingers on the table. Then she suddenly got a big grin on her face as she looked at Parida.

"I don't suppose we could work out a deal that includes coffee…"

* * *

"Coffee?" I asked later as we unequipped all of our gear and got ready to turn in for an early night's sleep. "Really, Cami?"

"Coffee," she echoed, slipping beneath the covers and pulling them tightly around her. The nights on this floor were a little chilly.

"It's nice that we're still mostly getting paid in Col, but wouldn't it have been better to ask for a little more money—money that we could not only use to buy coffee, but maybe also something that benefits the both of us?"

"Coffee _does_ benefit you," my wife protested while I turned on the fireplace and set it to a medium temperature. "It makes me not be a raging bitch in the mornings."

I had my doubts about that—whatever benefit she was getting had to be purely psychological; there was no actual caffeine reaching her brain when she drank this virtual coffee. I decided discretion was the better part of valor in this instance—or at the very least the better part of self-preservation.

"Besides," she said as she snuggled happily up against me. "I have ulterior motives. I had a thought earlier, that if we can establish a working relationship with this Parida person, it'd be really handy to have access to someone with a high-level Cooking skill. Maybe we could start eating a little better, buy food and drink directly from her."

It was actually a really good thought. And both Camilla and I preferred to patronize player merchants rather than NPCs if we had the opportunity; any money paid to NPCs just disappeared back into the game engine, whereas money paid to other players benefited a real person. "You may have something there," I allowed.

"Of course I do. Weren't you just telling me yesterday how nice it was to actually be eating player-made food again?"

My eyelids started to grow heavy and close. "Do you hear me arguing?"

"No. Which is good, because I much prefer cuddling and thinking about filling our inventory with yummy food."

As I began drifting off to sleep, my last conscious thought was: _If only all arguments could be settled that way._


	4. Field Trip

As we'd agreed the night before, Parida was waiting in the inn's tiny common room when we came downstairs in the morning. When she rose from her table, her appearance—no, her overnight _transformation_—was almost enough to make us both perform a classic double-take.

Instead of the simple blouse and dress with apron that she'd worn the night before, Parida was outfitted in a brown leather tunic just a few shades darker than her hair, which ended in a skirt of thick overlapping leather strips that came down almost to her knees. At her side was a quarterstaff only a little bit taller than she was—I would've pegged her at not quite two meters herself, maybe five foot eleven in Imperial units. The staff was a fairly nice piece of equipment, shod at both ends with gleaming steel caps and wrapped at intervals with supple leather in a contrasting tan color that probably improved her grip. The only thing that was the same was the elaborate set of braids governing her long hair—that, and the face that smiled up at us when she saw we'd come.

Apparently she hadn't been exaggerating about being able to fight—or at least, she had the look down. Most of her gear had to have either been dropped by mobs or commissioned at some expense from a player; it was doubtful anyone would spend that kind of money just to put up a front. I started feeling a little better about our mission, a little less like a babysitter.

The path to the Taft Foothills led northwest out of town, winding through a peninsula of wooded area that—looking down on it from a map's eye view—stuck out from the large western forest like a large thumb. The mob population in the part of the forest nearest town was thin, and frequently a party would be able to pass through to the Foothills without having to fight anything if another group had cleared it recently.

We weren't quite so lucky—we started running into insect-type mobs very soon after following the path into the woods. Parida hadn't disclosed her level to us, nor we to her, but she proved an able companion against these lower-level mobs. I'd had doubts about the effectiveness of a staff weapon, but she turned out to be very good at parrying attacks and creating openings for Camilla or me to switch in.

The EXP gain from these fights was minimal, but we stopped worrying about the waste of time when Parida pointed out that the occasional meat drops from these insects could actually be used as a cooking ingredient, and offered to buy them from us at the end of the day at a fair market price.

I had to admit: Cooking was starting to look better and better to me. I was _almost_ regretting the skill I'd chosen when I got my fourth slot.

Neither Camilla nor I had seen anyone gather ingredients before, so once we cleared an area we actually found it interesting to watch Parida at her work. Neither of us had any idea which plants were harvestable and which were simply scenery, but she didn't seem to waste any time on identification—she acted like she knew exactly what she was looking for, and probably did. She would kneel beside this particular bush or that and start picking, dropping stems or berries or the like onto her inventory window—at which point they would shimmer and fade as they were stored.

The process looked much like you'd expect a person harvesting in the real world to look—except that when she'd picked a plant over completely, the unharvestable part that remained would dissolve into a sparkling rain of green particles, leaving nothing behind. I presumed that these must be harvest nodes that would respawn after a set period of time.

"Okay, that's all I need from this area," Parida said as she dusted dirt from her bare knees with the palms of her hands. "Next we need to get to the other side of the Foothills and enter Weilan Marsh."

"What can you tell us about it?" Camilla asked as we continued on the path, the tree cover growing steadily sparser. We'd never actually ventured into the Marsh during the brief time we had hunted this floor while it was level-appropriate, nor had we needed to go there to farm Badger Teeth.

"Mostly insect and animal-type monsters," Parida replied, stepping over a particularly thick root that obstinately encroached upon the dirt path. "There are also the Amphorics, but they typically stay deeper in the Marsh; we won't need to deal with them if we stick to the outskirts."

"Amphorics?" I asked, not sure I liked the sound of the name.

"Amphibian humanoids," she explained. "They're semi-intelligent and use sword skills, but they're very territorial and don't venture out of their usual hunting grounds. I've never had a problem with them as long as I stay within sight of the edge of the Marsh."

Camilla and I traded looks. Bugs and beasts on this floor we could easily handle, but humanoids with the ability to use skills could be dangerous even to higher-level players. "Kadyn—"

"I know," I said, nodding. "Stay alert and keep Searching up often once we get there."

My wife gave me a quick smile of acknowledgement. Watching this exchange, Parida smiled as well, a wistful look in her light brown eyes. "You two are so lucky," she said. "Going out adventuring together, the rapport you have… I envy you."

"It's not just luck," I said, taking Camilla's hand as we walked. "We've been together for years, and we've been gaming together the entire time. It's taken a lot of time and effort to build the 'rapport' you're referring to."

"And it isn't always roses and unicorns either," Camilla said, giving me an affectionate bump with her hip. "But of all the people we could've been trapped with together in this world…"

Neither of us really needed to finish the sentence. It was a good moment, the kind of moment that reminded us of just how fortunate we really were. If one of us hadn't been interested in SAO, if either one of us had gone in without the other and never come out…

It didn't bear thinking about. I aggressively pushed the train of thought out of my head, with an unwitting assist from my wife as she nudged me with her elbow.

"Hm?" I said, my attention returning to the immediate surroundings; the path was starting to steepen as we ascended into the Foothills.

She pointed. "Your stinking Badgers." Sure enough, she was right: nobody had been out here hunting recently; I could see close to half a dozen Foothills Badgers—and those were only the ones within my line of sight.

I called over to Parida. "Do you mind if we pull these on our way? They're the whole reason we came down to this floor in the first place."

She shook her head, unlimbering her staff. "I don't mind. If we take time out to do it, can I have the meat?"

Neither Camilla nor I needed it; as far as I was concerned she could have all of it. We looked at each other and nodded.

Camilla drew her sword and made sure her shield was secure on her arm, panning her gaze around and settling on the nearest target. The animal mob sniffed at the ground, oblivious to the group outside of its aggro radius as it went through its idle animations and periodically scuffed its front paws as if digging.

"Everyone ready?" Parida and I nodded.

"Okay then," my wife said as she shifted her weight, grinning at me before composing herself and uttering the long-familiar word that heralded an imminent pull: "Incoming."

* * *

Two hours and thirty-seven Badger mobs later, the Foothills began to flatten out into sprawling wetlands; the relatively solid but moist soil covered in tall grass and cattails was interspersed with shallow muddy puddles of collected rainwater that squelched under our boots and clutched at them with each footstep. We could see the edge of the Marsh proper less than a hundred meters away, where tall trees with thick trunks and roots rose from deeper water dotted with islands of mud and loam.

Between the dodgy footing and Narida stopping frequently to harvest cattail stalks, our progress towards the marsh slowed to something only slightly above a crawl. When we finally reached the treeline, it was with a mix of relief and trepidation: between the fog that carpeted these lowlands and the thick tree canopy cutting off the remaining sunlight, the marsh was a dark place with an aura of foreboding that promised unknown dangers just out of sight.

I resolved to spend as little time here as possible. I would've been surprised if Camilla felt any differently; her posture was tense and her expression serious. "Kadyn?"

I was already scanning; I knew that Camilla and Parida would see a luminous greenish cast come over my eyes when I toggled Searching to active mode, like an aurora borealis flickering across the surface of my eyeball. The cursors of quite a few animal-type mobs became visible within the marsh, most of them non-aggro.

"It's clear," I said after a few moments. I pointed off towards the northeast. "There's a family of aggro mobs about thirty meters in; can't tell what they are from here but they're fairly weak. They should avoid us unless we get too close."

Nodding, Camilla turned to Parida. "What are we looking for?"

"Pillflowers," she replied. "They grow to about twenty centimeters above the surface of the water, with light violet petals. They're called that because when they first bloom, they unfold kind of like a pillbug. Don't worry; I know what I'm looking for. Just watch my back and don't go too far in."

"You got it," I said. I scanned one more time to make sure nothing that had been out of range before was roaming closer, and gave my wife a nod.

"One more thing," Parida said as we started towards the trees. "Try to stay on the ground, or walk along the roots of the trees. The water's only about knee-deep in most places, but sometimes there are sinkholes or other deep depressions, and you can find yourself taking an unexpected swim if you're not careful. If you're in heavy armor, that could be fatal. When you see me wading in, you'll notice I only walk where there are Pillflower stalks—that's because they don't grow tall enough to get above the water in the deeper parts."

All of this was good information; I filed it away for future use and resolved to avoid the water if possible. Parida didn't sound like she had much trouble in this area, but I had no idea what might be under that murky water and didn't care to find out.

Once we actually go to the trees, though, it turned out to be an easier time than I'd feared. I hadn't realized just how large the gnarled roots of these trees were; they intertwined with each other and almost formed a kind of meandering walkway through the swamp, albeit one that was slippery with moss and a fine sheen of clinging dampness from the humidity and fog. Camilla especially was careful with her footing, being heavier than Parida and I put together after taking her armor into account.

We did our best to keep to the outskirts of Weilan Marsh, keeping sight of the lowlands through the trees and staying on solid ground wherever possible—although "solid" was a bit of a misnomer; even on the ground our feet would sink into the muddy soil halfway to the tops of our boots. We only had to pull two aggro mobs that roamed too close to where Parida was harvesting; both went down quickly and with little fuss.

It was difficult to grasp the passage of time under the thick canopy; the fog and the lack of direct sunlight eliminated distinct shadows and turned everything into the murkiness of a perpetually overcast late afternoon. The sun had just started to become hazily visible beneath the edges of the treeline when Camilla threw up a hand to halt us and froze in place as she looked around intently.

"You feel it too?" I asked quietly. For several minutes I'd had a vague sense of unease, but every time I scanned the area my Searching skill brought back nothing but the cursors of non-aggro mobs.

"I thought I saw something," she said finally—her eyes gazing not deeper into the swamp from where we'd expect trouble, but outwards to the open wetlands whence we came. "Motion, very briefly, in the direction I'm looking now."

"I'm looking too," I said, my eyes slowly panning across a 120-degree arc. "Nothing though—_wait_."

For a moment, I thought that I'd seen something—a cursor, but a _player_ cursor, not a mob. An orange cursor. But there was no randomness in the Searching skill; it was a straight test against the level of the opponent's Hiding skill-they wouldn't flicker in and out as the system rolled unseen dice.

"What is it?" Parida asked, closing her inventory after stowing several more Pillflowers and noticing the change in our demeanor.

"I thought I saw—something that I couldn't have."

"Explain." Camilla's voice was terse.

I hesitated, still focusing on Searching, and dropped my concentration in order to try to describe what I'd seen.

"You're sure it was a player cursor?" Camilla asked, her eyes now fixed on the area we'd been watching.

"No," I said, "I'm really not sure. I thought I saw one for a moment, and then it was gone. The Hiding skill doesn't work that way—if my skill is higher, I see them; if theirs is higher, they stay hidden."

Her eyes tracing back and forth for a few moment moments, Camilla said suddenly, "I don't like this. Let's go."

That was when seven human forms surfaced about ten meters in front of us, water cascading down their bodies as they stood with a motley assortment of weapons drawn. Every one of them had an orange cursor which appeared the moment they were no longer submerged.

All of us had our weapons readied immediately. "Clever," Camilla said with a few other choice words added. Raising her voice, she called out to our opponents, "Welcome to the party, gentlemen. What's the dance?"

None of them responded as they started advancing and spreading out into a semicircle, flanking our position where we stood on an island of solid ground. "Back up," I said urgently, more for Parida's benefit than anyone else's. "Don't let them surround us."

It was hard to do, given the terrain. Keeping our footing was already a challenge when we were watching where we were going; it became considerably more difficult when we could only briefly glance over our shoulders before returning our eyes to the armed bandits we faced.

"That's her," one of them called out suddenly, pointing at Camilla with his short sword. "That's the one who ran us off yesterday."

The voice was familiar, and the words he spoke made it immediately clear why: it was the bandit swordsman who'd fled Camilla's threat. I looked around at each one that faced us now, but didn't see Mallek or Viyami among them. I was surprised to be relieved by that; from a strictly practical standpoint having them here would mean at least three opponents we knew we could defeat.

But these were more than twice our number, and their strength was unknown.

Nor did they look to be in a mood to negotiate after the swordsman called out Camilla. The closest one to her nodded, raising his mace to point at the other bandits in turn. "Kill the Valkyrie. Kill the man. Take the other one alive if you—"

He didn't get to finish his instructions. As soon as she heard the beginning of his orders, Camilla had kicked off the root that she'd been standing on, her Anneal Blade +5 scything through the air with a blinding flash of red light. The first hit took the bandit leader completely unawares, slashing him diagonally across the shoulder and twice more in the chest before she hit the water in front of him.

A thick fountain of swamp water sprayed out in every direction when she landed, showering the nearby bandits and blinding them briefly. Into that distraction she executed her Uppercut skill, the upwards slash drawing a line of glowing red across the length of the wounded bandit leader's body from crotch to chin. He had barely begun flying upwards before he shattered, a twinkling green polygonal mist falling across Camilla like rain as she lunged at the next bandit with a vicious four-hit combo that cut down almost half of his HP bar through his guard.

"Camilla!" I shouted. "Get back here, we can't take all of them!" Three were already running at me, and I gave Parida a shove to urge her to retreat. She was paying us to protect her from exactly this kind of threat; I was damned if I was going to let her get cut down.

To her credit—and my relief—Camilla didn't seem to be intent on suicidally facing down all of the bandits at once. As soon as her surprise attack had taken out their leader and sent one more of their number staggering back with his HP severely depleted, she knocked back the next nearest one with her shield and ran towards one of the bandits attacking me, running him through from behind with her sword. She twisted her hips, withdrawing her blade and delivering a shield bunt to him in the same motion. The bandit wasn't dead, but I caught a glimpse of red from his HP gauge as he toppled back into the swamp, his scream cut off by a mouthful of the stagnant water.

I couldn't block with my dagger, but Parida had refused to retreat, instead using her staff to deflect an attack coming at me from my blind side. Resolving to thank her later for not paying attention to what I told her to do, I leapt into the opening with a streak of blue trailing from my dagger, a series of rapid stabs turning my arm into a blur and cutting down close to a third of my opponent's gauge. A heavy thud struck me from my other side, shaving off some of my own HP gauge and sending me sprawling into the muddy ground.

When I looked up, I saw my assailant go flying for several meters as Camilla used her shield charge technique, water fanning out in a wide spray from the path the skill took as it carried her in a blurred dash from her origin to her target. Before I heard the splash of his body hitting the water, Parida had yanked me to my feet.

At least five—no, six very angry bandits were either still on their feet or coming to, a few of them uninjured. Outnumbered, the three of us took to the roots of the trees, running as fast as we could while keeping our footing. With our escape cut off, there was only one way for us to go.

Running for our lives in a fighting retreat, we fled deeper and deeper into Weilan Marsh.


	5. Gekkekagh

Once the fog and the overlapping veil of thick tree trunks conspired to hide the outer wetlands from us, it became nearly impossible to tell how much time had passed—or how far in we'd gone. It couldn't have been long. I could've checked my system menu or opened my map if we'd had a moment's respite, but we didn't—we were either fleeing or fighting the entire way. Mostly fleeing, but every now and then one of us would lose our footing long enough for a bandit to catch up, or a long stretch of clear ground would allow them to overtake us; they were unencumbered by armor for the most part, whereas Camilla had her suit of heavy plate slowing her down.

When those times came, we would do what we could to delay them or knock some of them down, forcing them to take time to regroup instead of pursuing us one by one and risking defeat in detail. Camilla's shield became exceptionally useful then, and Parida surprised all of us by unleashing a knockdown technique with her quarterstaff that could sweep multiple opponents off their feet if she was on solid ground.

All three of us had lost HP, but we were all still in the green and I had managed to land a blow on the bandit who'd been in the red, shattering him and buying us a few moments' head start as the bandits reacted to this. I had enough time to notice that there were only four bandits pursuing us; one of them must have given up the chase.

"This doesn't make sense," I yelled to Camilla as we ran. "Why are they after us so hard? This is costing them too dearly to be about loot."

"It's not," she yelled back, turning to use her shield to bash a bandit who'd drawn too close, sending him flying back into his companions who were right on his heels. Resuming her headlong sprint, she added, "this is personal. I don't—ack!—I don't know why, but that's what it feels like to me."

I was inclined to agree, but I was not inclined to spend any more time or attention on conversation. As it was, due to the brief distraction I didn't notice the cursors of aggro mobs until I heard Parida's frantic yell. "Amphorics!" At the same time, Camilla shouted her own warning. "Adds!"

That was what I'd been afraid of. As the bipedal amphibians rose from the water to either side of us, jagged weapons of bone and bronze in their hands, I saw light red cursors appear above their heads—and then I realized where it was the bandits had gotten the idea of concealing themselves in the water, and why I'd only briefly been able to detect one as they had surfaced to avoid drowning.

And as I looked back and saw the bandits had halted their pursuit, I also realized the trap they'd set for us. They hadn't been trying to run us down, although they would've taken us if they could've. They'd been driving us.

Hounds to the hunters.

One by one, we saw more Amphorics emerging from the swamp around us. Four, nine, a dozen—I stopped counting. "Camilla!" I shouted as I skidded to a stop, almost losing my footing as I turned around and ran back the way we'd come. "Train to zone!"

It was a phrase from our old MMO days, referring to one of the only hopes for escape when you'd pulled too many aggro mobs: an all-out run to the transition point where you crossed into another zone, a "train" of mobs trailing behind you. Usually mobs would be tethered to a particular area and wouldn't cross those transition points. You had to pray you were fast enough, pray you didn't get taken out by ranged attacks, and pray no other unfortunate players crossed your path while you fled.

But SAO didn't have zones like that. The only transition points it had were the warp gates between cities. I could see Camilla's momentary confusion as I dashed past her, saw her open her mouth to ask what I was thinking.

Then, trusting me, she followed—Parida close behind.

The bandits had been cheering and laughing as we stumbled into Amphoric territory and aggroed a crowd of mobs. I heard one of them starting to offer bets on how many of the Amphorics we'd take out before we died. Then another cried out in alarm as he saw us unexpectedly running towards them with a huge train of mobs behind us. They all raised their weapons.

I shouted again. "Camilla! Make a hole!"

A blue streak shot past me as Camilla activated her shield charge again, crossing the five-meter distance between us and the bandits and battering two of them aside. I ran through the gap, Parida hot on my heels, and scanned the swamp ahead of me with a desperate gaze. I knew what I was looking for, and just hoped I'd find it.

I did. Ahead and to the left I saw an open stretch of water with no Pillflowers or any other vegetation growing out of it. Hoping my guess was right, I called out one last time to my companions. "Dive!" And with that one word, I launched myself off of the tree root walkway, diving headfirst into what I hoped against hope was actually deep water.

Cold, murky water enveloped me, cutting off the sounds of the outside world and turning my vision black. I heard the deep bubbling thumps of a pair of muffled splashes near me, and kept swimming downwards until I touched the slimy, algae-covered bottom.

What I'd thought at first was silence, wasn't. It was like hearing a battle through earplugs, shouts and the clash of weapons attenuated into a muddle of mid-range sound with all the bass and treble stripped away by the barrier of water. I waited to be attacked, waited for blows to start falling on me from the Amphorics—but none came.

I heard a chime in my ear, and looked up and to the left. I couldn't see anything under this dank water, but the HUD superimposed on my vision was crystal clear even when my eyes were closed. My HP gauge was flashing as it slowly ticked downwards, a status icon like a drop of water appearing beside it. I'd exhausted some kind of set time I could spend underwater, and although my avatar didn't require oxygen, I was starting to lose health by "drowning".

Kicking off the bottom, I burst through the surface and staggered into the shallows, spitting out a mouthful of the nasty water. My chest heaved as I unnecessarily gasped for air out of reflex, but the moment I'd broken the surface my HP had stopped dropping.

Rinsing mud away from my face, I looked around and saw that Camilla had already surfaced; she'd been lower on HP than I was. Parida was right next to her, eyes wide. I followed their gaze and felt a cold knife of fear slide down my back.

The bandits were gone. Surrounding us was a crowd of Amphorics, their silence more frightening than if they'd been screaming or making animalistic sounds. Their weapons were leveled at us… but they weren't attacking.

"Camilla," I began. "What is goi—"

I cut myself off as I focused on one of them with slightly more ornate garb than the others, my eyes going to its cursor. A cursor that should have been a pale red, indicating an aggro mob that was a bit below our level. It wasn't—instead, it was a pale yellow, indicating non-aggro status or neutrality.

It made no sense.

Then, as I watched in astonishment, a glowing golden question mark appeared over its head.

None of us spoke for I don't know how long. A minute, maybe longer. The Amphorics surrounding us shifted their weight from foot to foot, occasionally adjusting their grip on their weapons; after a time I recognized the repeating patterns of idle animations. They were waiting for input.

The question was: what was the right input? There was a quest here, but was there a right way and a wrong way to activate it? Would we re-aggro them if we gave the wrong response?

From the pensive look on Camilla's face, she was having similar thoughts. Thankfully she was smart enough not to brandish her weapon; I could see the grip of her sheathed sword sticking out over her right shoulder.

"I don't understand," Parida said quietly. "What just happened?"

"We broke the encounter," I said. Seeing her uncomprehending look, I explained. "The Amphorics aggroed us. We trained them onto the bandits. Then we dove underwater. Just like the surface of the water kept my Searching skill from detecting the bandits or Amphorics while they were submerged, it broke the line of sight from the Amphorics to us and caused them to turn on the only remaining targets: the bandits."

"But why aren't they attacking us now?" Camilla wondered. "Not that I'm complaining, but… it doesn't make sense."

"I'm not sure," I said. "But I think you might've had something to do with it."

My wife looked at me in confusion, then back at the Amphoric mobs that were still standing there in an idle animation. More than a dozen sets of slitted pupils stared back at us. In a flash of insight, I held up a hand to stave off any further questions and addressed the Amphoric with the quest marker over his head.

"Thank you for saving us. You attacked our enemies and we are grateful." It was best to keep dialogue with NPCs as simple as possible; getting too fancy with your phrasing could confuse their language processing. I had no idea if they'd even understand what I was saying, but the quest marker suggested that I should at least try.

The question mark blinked once, and then turned into an exclamation point. I let out a sigh of relief.

"Humans do not come here often," said the Amphoric in a bubbling growl that I hoped was its normal speaking voice. "When they do, they attack and kill, attack us and take what is ours. You do not. You attack the humans who do."

It was as I'd suspected—to be honest, _hoped_ as much as expected. As humanoid mobs, the Amphorics had some degree of factional behavior coded into them, capable of discerning between hostile and non-hostile behavior. Entering their territory was considered hostile behavior, which was why we'd aggroed them initially—but I was betting that when we trained them onto the bandits, we'd left the boundaries of their territory. And by attacking another player that they'd aggroed, it had registered this as a friendly action on our parts and flipped their faction status to neutral regarding us.

It was the only explanation I could come up with for why we were still alive.

"We are sorry for intruding. We do not want to attack you," I said. "The other humans chased us here. They tried to kill us."

The Amphoric quest giver bobbed its glistening green head up and down, side to side. I hoped that was a positive gesture. "That is good that you do not attack us," it croaked. "It is good that you attack our enemies. We will allow you to go in peace this time."

"Thank you," I said, bowing. As I did, Camilla and Parida imitated the motion. I didn't fail to notice the addition of _this time_. The smartest thing to do then would've probably been to turn and go, but there was still a golden exclamation point hanging over the Amphoric's head—indicating that a quest was still in progress. I opened my quest log window and scrolled through it until I found an entry titled _Amphoric Allies_. It contained brief notes about what we'd done so far, but no hint as to what to do next.

Then I thought about it for a moment, and as I read the title of the quest again, tumblers fell into place in my head. Taking a deep breath and venturing an educated guess, I addressed the Amphoric again. "I am Kadyn. May I ask the name of the friend who saved our lives?"

Any number of things could've happened at that point. The yellow cursors could've turned red if I'd said the wrong thing. They could've walked off and left us to go. Instead, it gave that odd bobbing and weaving gesture of its head again, and pointed to its own blunt snout. "This one is called Gekkekagh. Gekkekagh has the privilege of being Huntmaster to our tribe." There was a brief pause, a flicker of the nictitating membranes over the humanoid's eyes, and it held out its spear for one of its comrades to take. Hands freed, it reached up to its neck and removed a necklace of leather cord threaded with the teeth of various animals and a single bronze disc with a series of unreadable glyphs. It held the necklace out to me; I received it with both hands and wide eyes.

"If you return to this place, you will wear this. In wearing it, you and your friends will not be attacked. This Gekkekagh swears upon the eggs of his mate."

Pushing aside my astonishment, I tapped the item I'd just received. A status window appeared with the caption of _Gekkekagh's Seal_, a necklace item with +5 to Agility and a special effect: _While equipped, Amphorics will remain neutral to the wearer and their party or raid members unless attacked first._

Closing the status window and equipping the item, I bowed again to the Amphoric. "Gekkekagh does me honor. I swear on, er, the eggs of my mate that I will leave in peace and do no harm to your tribe."

_Please, if there be gods, let my wife _not _crack up right now_. I could tell from the strangled noises coming from beside me that she was devoting a Herculean effort to keeping a straight face.

The head bob again. "That is good." And with that, the quest marker over the Amphoric's head disappeared. As one, Gekkekagh and his group sank beneath the water, ripples marking their passage as they swam back to their territory.

Moments later, a window popped up in front of me. _Quest complete: Amphoric Allies_. As with most unmarked "secret" quests, it was a sizable sum of EXP, and it had a 20% bonus added for completing the optional condition at the end.

"Kadyn?" Camilla said, her voice almost choked.

I turned to my wife. As I did, the choking sounds gave way to a snort, then a snicker, and then peals of laughter as she threw herself at me and hugged me, the combined mass of her and her armor almost knocking me off my feet. "Oh my God, I love you. Love you love you love you. I don't know how the hell you pulled off these last ten minutes of sheer insanity, and I don't care. We're alive and you are _so_ getting laid tonight."

Laughing with her both out of hilarity and the relief of still being alive, I fought for control of my expression as she made her promise and cleared my throat, nodding towards Parida. Our companion's ears were burning and her cheeks were bright red, but she was having as hard a time keeping a straight face as we were.

Camilla coughed slightly and grinned at both of us, stepping away and checking over the durability of her equipment. Grimacing at what she saw, she opened our inventory and withdrew three healing potions, handing one to each of us. "Everyone drink up, and let's get going. We're cold, wet, and tired, and I don't know about you but my gear is in pretty bad shape. Plus it's starting to get dark and I'd rather be out of this place before night falls, weekend pass from the Frog King or no."

It was hours later when we finally reached Taft, and by that point the moon had risen over the foothills that took their name from the town. We'd been fortunate that we'd only had to pull a small handful of mobs on the way back—the minimum necessary to clear a safe path.

As we passed through the city gates and reached the inn where we were staying, Parida gave a low bow of deep, sincere respect, remaining that way as she spoke. "Thank you, both of you. I owe you my life. If you hadn't been there—"

"You fought alongside us when you could've run," Camilla said, interrupting her. "Despite the fact that you were paying us to protect you. If you hadn't, we'd both be dead."

Straightening, Parida smiled at both of us in turn. "I imagine you'll be wanting to clean up. I have to go to the pub; Hinami was expecting me back a long time ago and is probably worried sick. Come by when you're done? There's still the matter of payment to arrange."

"We'll do that," I replied. Camilla echoed my agreement, and together we took our leave to go shed our battered equipment and get rid of some of the day's grime.

Later, much cleaner and wearing a set of city clothes, we pushed open the door to the pub. We'd decided to keep these clothes around after the hiatus we'd taken from adventuring, and more than once it had proven a wise choice on a day when we decided we'd rather be wearing something other than our equipment or the plain tunics we wore underneath. Camilla always looked stunning in that deep blue dress of hers, which matched her eyes and nicely set off the orange-red of her hair. My simple tunic and trousers were less impressive, but they were quite a bit more comfortable than my leather armor. The only piece of equipment I still wore was an unusual-looking tribal necklace with a bronze disc.

The pub was fairly busy compared to the recent days we'd been here—which was to say, there were about seven or eight patrons, five of which were occupying a single table and being extremely loud. When we entered, Hinami gave out a loud squeak and called back towards the kitchen: "Parida! They're here!"

Bemused, my wife and I glanced at each other, shrugged, and sought out a seat at the smallest table in the room. As we did, Parida emerged from the kitchen in the same working outfit she'd been wearing the day before, bearing a wide tray from which Hinami started taking dishware and setting it on our table.

Before us was some of the most amazing food we'd seen since we first logged into this game. Each main plate had a savory-smelling steak of some unidentified meat, a side of greens and root vegetables nestled up against the cut of meat. Bowls with what almost smelled like miso soup were next, followed by a cup of green tea for me and coffee for my wife. As we looked on, jaws agape and too stunned to come up with words, Parida used a spoon to ring an empty glass like a bell, raising it high. "Everyone please excuse the interruption, may I have your attention please?"

Silence fell on the pub, aside from one kid with shaggy blond hair who obliviously almost kept going with what he'd been saying until being elbowed by one of his friends. I felt like shrinking into my chair; Camilla's ears were red and she looked like she wanted to hide about as badly as I did. When all eyes were on her and the astonishing feast she'd just served up, Parida made her announcement.

"You all know I've been running short on supplies for making the food you all eat every day. Today I hired these two players to escort me to Weilan Marsh so that I could stock up without being afraid of bandits."

Scattered clapping broke out, and a single whoop from one of the people at the table of five before two of the others shushed him.

"We were attacked by bandits all right—_seven_ of them. They didn't just try to rob us, they tried to _kill_ us." This time the reaction from the room was widespread, gasps of shock and more than a few exclamations of outrage. Parida rang the glass with her spoon again for quiet.

"My new friends here fought them off and bravely—cleverly—defeated them all. How it happened is their story to tell, not mine, but suffice to say: they saved my life, and Hinami and I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude that we can never repay. This meal—and the payment we promised—are the least we can do."

The cheers that broke out then were as intense as the outrage had been just moments before. Everyone in the room was clapping furiously, interspersed with a few whistles from the blond kid. Most of the people in the room must have been regular customers here, because a number of them got up and came over to congratulate and thank us.

When I turned to look at my wife amidst all the clamor, I expected to see her still embarrassed and trying to become one with the scenery. Instead, I saw the most beautiful, radiant smile on her face and a single tear running down her cheek.

"Thank you," she whispered, the words almost lost in the din.

* * *

**10/8/2012: **Reworded a few passages for clarity; nothing that materially affects the story. Corrected a place where I misspelled Parida's name.


	6. The Plan

Before long, Parida shooed all the well-wishers back to their own tables so that my wife and I could eat our "victory dinner" in peace. Well, relative peace, anyway—the atmosphere in the pub was raucous tonight, mostly due to the boisterous chatter from the group of five players who'd been part of the crowd to come over and thank us for saving their friend (and, of course, helping ensure they could continue to eat her fine food). We hadn't been introduced directly to any of them by name, but when Hinami came over to bring Camilla another coffee she said they were a local guild with the amusing name of _The Black Cats of the Moonlit Night_.

"Nice people," she said, smiling broadly. "A little loud sometimes, as you can probably tell, but we like having them here—they're all close friends and their attitude is infectious."

After Hinami had gone off to take someone else's order, Camilla and I returned to our own much quieter conversation. "Déjà vu," I commented.

"Hm? Oh, you mean the whole heroes' welcome thing?"

"You read my mind," I replied, taking a bite of the steak and savoring it. The flavor was unlike any other meat I'd had before; I wondered if it was from one of the stacks of meat we'd collected today as drops.

"Didn't need to," my wife replied, her face a mask of bliss as she ate her dinner. "To be perfectly honest… a girl could get used to this. It's not like before, when we hadn't really done anything to earn it and actually had to hide the truth. We really did do something wonderful out there today."

"You looked pretty embarrassed at first," I said with a teasing undertone.

"Oh, I _so_ was," she replied, covering her face and slouching in her chair melodramatically. "I wasn't expecting anything like this and I just wanted to melt into the floor when Parida called us out in front of everyone." She waved her fork as she grasped for words, a bit of steak still steaming on it. "But then it was like… when I saw how genuinely happy everyone was, and about something we'd actually truly done… it was the most amazing feeling."

I nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. "Kind of like how I imagine policemen or firefighters might feel when the family of someone they saved comes up and thanks them."

Camilla snapped her fingers. "_Pin pon_. You just hit it on the head; that's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't want us to get full of ourselves, but… this whole helping people out, making a noticeable difference in their lives… it's a good feeling. These people are happy right now because of us. Because of something we did. We could do some good here."

"Careful," I cautioned, not entirely in jest. "Heroes have an unfortunate tendency to meet an untimely end."

I immediately regretted the comment, truthful though it might have been, when my wife's smile vanished. "Like Diabel," she said a little more softly.

"Like Diabel," I echoed. "If ever there were a time when I wished he was still around…"

"I know," Camilla said, a slight glistening at the corners of her eyes. "I miss him, Kadyn. If he hadn't died, we were going to go out together with him and Agil, and we would've swept the second floor. Maybe even taken part in the raid there. He would've insisted on pressing on as hard as we could, and he would've been right. With the four of us, and maybe a fifth if we could've found one, we could've kept up with the front lines—or at least not fallen so far behind."

"I sometimes wonder what would've happened if we'd joined the first floor raid," I said, thinking back to the day we'd bid Diabel farewell and good luck. The last day we'd ever seen him, or ever would again. "He offered us a spot in that incomplete group with the two soloers, and if we'd taken him up on that, two more people might've made the difference—made it so that he didn't have to die."

Camilla closed her eyes tightly, a few tears leaking out of them which she quickly swiped away with the cuff of her dress sleeve. "We need to change the subject," she said.

"It's not like you to brood about the past or what-ifs anyway," I commented, giving her a smile that I hoped would help lift her spirits. "That's my job."

My wife kicked me lightly under the table, but the smile was back on her face. Mission accomplished.

"Come on," I said, shoveling another mouthful of greens. "Let's finish this magnificent feast and go talk business with Parida."

When we finished eating, however, our hostess once again seemed to have something already in mind. As Hinami was clearing the table, Parida paid us what we'd agreed for the job and then dragged us over to the other side of the pub. The Black Cats had invited us to come join them for drinks, and since we were the last patrons in the pub Parida and Hinami pushed another large table over against the guild's table and sat down with us.

After introductions had been made all around, their guild leader—a tall, handsome boy named Keita—spoke up. "First thing I want to do is thank you both. We spoke briefly earlier, but we can't thank you enough for what you did for Parida—for everyone who lives in this town, really. It means a lot to us."

"We were happy to do it," I said, sipping at my sake.

"Except for the part where we were running for our lives in the swamp, training about eleventy-bajillion aggro mobs and getting a faceful of mucky water," Camilla put in. "That kinda sucked."

Keita and several of the others laughed. "Actually," he said, "I wanted to ask if you'd be willing to give us any more details about what happened out there. As you've probably heard—and seen, now—the bandit problem on this floor has gotten pretty bad recently."

"How recently?" I asked.

"The last few weeks or so," Parida said as Hinami finished her cleanup duties and sat down beside her. "Like most floors, we've always had a small criminal element, a handful of orange players who would try to intimidate small groups and solo players. Occasionally it would end in a fight, but death was rare and it was never the point. And they didn't dare come very close to the town."

Keita nodded, along with the rest of his guild. "A few weeks ago, we started hearing rumors of groups being hit by orange players that were much more aggressive. Sometimes they would attack without warning, only stopping when their victims surrendered and begged for mercy."

"Has your guild had any run-ins with them?" I asked.

"Thank goodness, no," Keita replied with audible relief in his voice. "But as I'm sure Parida told you when she hired you, they've hit her before more than once—and the most recent time they actually attacked her; she was lucky to get away alive. They've become ruthless and dangerous—and greater in number. Some people have even been attacked in the woods just outside of Taft."

"That happened to us yesterday," Camilla said with a tight expression. "Three of them tried to shake us down in the woods, but we managed to scare them off after a brief fight. One of those was in the larger group that attacked us today."

"But they've never actually killed anyone yet," said another boy who Keita had introduced as Tetsuo. "What happened out there?"

Taking turns, Camilla and I began to relate the story, starting from the time that we encountered the bandits. There were wide eyes and stunned expressions all around the table at more than one point, and plain shock when we described the late bandit leader's orders to kill Camilla and me and to try to capture Parida. The smallest member of the Black Cats, a young dark-haired girl with beautiful blue-green eyes Keita had introduced as Sachi, had both hands over her mouth and looked like she might be ill.

"It took me a moment to realize who they were referring to," Parida put in.

I glanced at her curiously. "What do you mean?"

"Remember what he said? I can still play it back in my mind. 'Kill the Valkyrie. Kill the man.'" Parida shivered as she imitated the bandit's voice. "Gave me chills. It took me a moment to realize that by _Varukirii_ he meant your wife."

There was something about that term that tugged at my memory. I glanced over at Camilla, whose usually pale freckled skin was, if possible even paler.

"Remember those rumors back in Horunka?" I asked, nudging her. "The ones where everyone thought you'd fought some kind of epic battle with a PKer? They called you _Akage Varukirii_, the Redheaded Valkyrie. Agil got a good laugh out of it."

"That's not what I was reminded of," Camilla said, her voice a little slow and distant. "Someone else called me that too once. Someone who heard those rumors and thought they were true."

My entire body went cold, as if I'd been plunged into a bath of ice water. I now knew exactly who she was talking about, and exactly why she seemed so shaken. I remembered, and I knew Camilla could see from my expression that I now remembered.

None of the others at the table could possibly know what we were talking about. I could see confusion on their faces at this exchange between Camilla and I, and unease at our sudden shift in demeanor.

"What's wrong?" asked Hinami worriedly.

"I think we might have an idea of what's behind your bandit problem," I said tentatively.

Camilla nodded, her face ashen. "Or who. And if we're right… it's bad news. Very, very bad."

Keita nodded at us, and gestured for us to go on.

"Back in the early days of the game," Camilla began, downing the rest of her drink, "we joined a group with a young boy. We didn't realize it at the time because our appearances had changed, but that boy had tried to PK us when we first ventured outside of the city—before Kayaba summoned us all, before anyone knew this was anything other than an ordinary MMO where being PKed just meant you lost some stuff and respawned. We'd defeated him then, and he wanted revenge. He recognized me because my avatar hadn't been very different from my real appearance."

"He attacked me and nearly killed me," I said, rubbing at the small of my back where the dagger had plunged in. "My wife saved me, nearly killing him in the process. But when we realized that he was just a terrified thirteen year old kid begging for his life who hadn't really accepted what had happened… we healed him and let him go, hoping he'd learn from this and stay green. When we got back to town, rumors had spread of an attempted PK—back then it was even more shocking news than it would be now—but because we didn't want to out the kid, we had to let people assume that we'd defeated him. It made us famous for a short time as some kind of anti-PKers—especially my wife, who'd been the one to take him down."

Camilla nodded grimly, picking up there. "Fame that we didn't want… and which came back to haunt us. A few weeks later we were part of one of the lead groups exploring the first floor dungeon, and we were ambushed by a small group of orange players—at least a few of them serious, actual PKers, not just bandits. They believed the rumors that we'd taken down a PKer, and wanted revenge so that people wouldn't take them lightly, or something stupid like that. They killed three of our group before we drove them off."

That was leaving out a few things, like the point where Reznor—the kid we'd spared—had sacrificed himself to save Camilla's life. And the part at the end where she had executed the traitor who'd betrayed us—a person who'd been our prisoner at the time. But I didn't feel like bringing those things up, and I doubted she would either.

"'Time's wasting, Valkyrie'," Camilla quoted—the line that their leader had said as our friend Niara lay immobile on the ground, her HP slowly draining away. He'd ordered a member of his group to poison our friend Niara while she was paralyzed; a move intended to force my wife to disarm herself. Camilla had known they'd simply kill us all if she did that, and had stalled long enough for the paralysis status to wear off—but she blamed herself for Niara's death, and so had Niara's boyfriend Torik.

As Camilla explained all of this, I could see a mixture of fear and anger in the faces of everyone at the table. Sachi, the small dark-haired girl, was sniffling quietly and not hiding it well. Keita finally managed to compose himself, and spoke up. "So you think that's who's behind our bandit problem?"

Camilla nodded. "Until today, I've only been called 'Valkyrie' twice—once in those dumb rumors back in Horunka, which I'd be surprised if _anyone_ who wasn't personally involved even remembers… and by the leader of that group. We killed two—no, three of his group that day. The number of people sick enough to actually want to commit murder in this game has to be vanishingly small. If he's here now… I'm betting this is his attempt at some kind of _farm team_." The last two words were in English.

"A what?" asked Sasamaru, a young man in a green tunic and light armor.

"It means he's gathering orange players here and grooming them to see which ones are potential recruits," I explained. "If we're right, and this is who you're dealing with, he's probably been driving them to become more aggressive, trying to break down any reluctance they have to kill. I doubt he cares what happens to the ones who fail—or to anyone on this floor after he's done. If he can find even one single player who suits his purposes, he can walk away in a better position than before."

"We can't let him do that," Camilla said flatly.

"I'm inclined to agree," I said, "but what exactly are we in a position to do about it? They were already stronger than us the last time we tangled; we both almost died."

"We'll do whatever we can to help," Keita said, clenching one of his fists. Most of his guildmates nodded—all, I noticed again, save Sachi, who still looked spooked. She seemed like she was trying to put a brave face on it, but every now and then I saw her hands were shaking. I wondered what she was doing in this group; she didn't seem like she belonged or really had the temperament for adventuring. But the others treated her like part of their family, and she'd been laughing along with them earlier.

Camilla turned and looked straight at the leader of the Black Cats. "Please, Keita—this is our fight. We got here less than a week ago, so I doubt we had anything to do with them being here originally… but if this is who we think it is, then they have an old score to settle with us. Once they knew we were here they sent their goons after us in force. That almost got Parida killed—and the last time we went head to head with them, it _did_ get three other people killed."

"All the more reason to get more people to help," insisted Sasamaru calmly. "We _live_ here. This is our home they brought this to. We have a stake in this too."

Camilla looked thoughtful. I could see wheels turning in her head.

"I'll support you however I can if you've got a plan," I said to her. "But I need to know you've thought this through. If we go off half-cocked, we'll just get ourselves killed."

The change was fascinating to watch. Whatever wheels had been turning in my wife's head must have settled into place; a wicked smile overtook her as she came to her feet, palms flat on the table while she leaned forward. I wouldn't have wanted to be the target of whatever idea burned behind that smile.

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," she said, conviction filling her voice. "I'm going to give them what they asked for."

I had no earthly idea what she meant by that. There were times she and I could read each other like a book… and then there were times like this, when her mind moved in ways that were simply foreign to me. I gave her a questioning look.

"Kadyn, this is the second time—no, the third if you count the rope bridge—that we've been targeted because these assholes think I'm some kind of PK-hunter. _They're not going to leave us alone. Ever. _They want to call me _Varukirii_ and treat me as if I'm some kind of Nemesis for them? Fine. I will bring down a world of hurt on their whole operation here that will make them sorry they ever crossed our path."

She straightened and turned back to Keita. "I'm sorry, but I have to ask: what level is your group?"

A couple of the Black Cats shifted uncomfortably. "We don't really get up anywhere near the front lines," said Ducker, the smaller kid with the shaggy blond hair.

Keita nodded. "Our levels are mostly in the high teens. Plenty high enough to grind on the 14th or 15th floors where we usually go."

Camilla nodded. "That'll do. Most of the bandits we encountered were fairly weak—a little stronger than the average player that hunts on this floor, but it was just their numbers that made them a threat to us. You're a little lower than us, but still considerably stronger than someone who's level-appropriate for this area—and still stronger than the bandits on a one-to-one basis."

I thought I knew, then, exactly what Camilla had in mind—and I was not exactly comfortable with the idea. Sasamaru and Keita seemed to be the oldest of the group, but I couldn't help thinking that none of them could be older than high school age. Just kids, really. "Camilla, you can't be thinking of using them—"

"As bait?" she said, looking almost hurt that I'd think that. "No. Actually, I had just the opposite in mind."

I raised an eyebrow.

"We're the bait," she said. "The Black Cats are the teeth of the trap."

"_Nyaa_," said Ducker, grinning and meowing.

I listened quietly as my wife sat back down and carefully laid out her plan. Both of us would get cloaks that hid our features, changing into different clothes and equipping some of our backup armor and weapons. We would go out hunting, hiding our stronger skills and appearing to be a pair of lower-level adventurers who were easy pickings for any given group of bandits. The Black Cats would be following several minutes behind—a large enough group of well-equipped players that they themselves were unlikely to be attacked, but far enough from our little duo to be out of detection range from anyone laying an ambush for us.

"When they come for us—and they will—there's a good chance they'll see an easy mark and demand we hand over our equipment. We'll put on the scaredy act and open our menus—but instead of dropping our equipment, we'll quickly switch to our real gear. That's when I'll signal the Cats to come in while we keep them busy."

"Signal?" Keita asked. "What kind of signal?"

Camilla grinned. "There's an NPC who sells musical instruments in Taft, right?"

"There is," Hinami answered as she moved around the table and refilled everyone's drinks from a stoneware pitcher of steaming hot sake. "But the stuff he sells is kinda crappy. Nowhere near as good as player-made."

"That's okay," my wife said, waving a hand. "I just need a whistle I can wear around my neck. I don't need it to make music—just noise."

Parida almost snorted out her sake, setting the cup down and dabbing at her face with a napkin. "That much I'm sure it'll do."

Suddenly, the little dark-haired girl who'd been mostly quiet and timid this whole time spoke up. "What happens to the bandits?"

Camilla blinked a couple times, her cup stopping halfway to her lips. "Well, I guess that all depends on what they do. The idea is for our surprise and your group's numbers to make it more likely they'll just surrender. But we'll fight them if we have to."

"I don't want to kill anyone," Sachi insisted. "I can't. I don't even know if I could fight another player."

My wife looked over at the young girl, the intense look she'd been wearing softening a bit. "You'd be surprised what you can do when the people you care about are threatened. I expect you'll find that you're stronger than you think."

"Everyone says that to me," she said. "But what if it's not true?"

"But I think it is," Camilla said to her, setting down her cup and looking the girl in the eyes. "Courage isn't about not being scared, honey. It's about being scared and doing what you have to do anyway. As to your question about what happens to the bandits… if they surrender, then we'll escort them back to town under guard and warp back to the Starting City. There's a guild that's been keeping order there, and they have a jail for orange players."

"And if they don't surrender?" Sachi asked.

Camilla's eyes hardened. I saw steel creep into the look on her face, a hint of the ruthlessness that she'd shown only a few times before. "Then I will give the next group an incentive to make a better choice," she said coldly. "I will make them fear the Valkyrie."


	7. Trojan Noobs

As the door to the NPC vendor closed behind us, Camilla reached up to the cord around her neck and fingered the little _tsuchibue _that she'd purchased. For such a tiny thing, she'd spent close to fifteen minutes testing out different instruments until she found the one that suited her. It hadn't been the loudest pipe or whistle in the store, although it was plenty loud and my ears were still ringing from all the tests in that enclosed space—but it was made of metal and had a small loop at the closed end, allowing it to be worn like a pendant.

Raising it to her lips, she blew a series of notes—softly at first, but then as loud as she could to test how it sounded in open air. Players glanced in the direction of the noise from up and down the street.

"Do you know how to play one of those?" I asked.

"Nope," Camilla said, dropping it back down inside the neckline of her tunic. "Yow! Cold metal! No, but it's basically just a Japanese-style ocarina. I'm not planning on becoming a bard, just using it to signal."

"Good thing," I replied. "Because SAO doesn't have bard classes and you have a tin ear." I was already dancing out of the way when she tried to whack me lightly in the arm.

"Oh, I do not! Just because cats flee when I try to sing doesn't mean I couldn't play a song if I wanted. Here, let me show you one: I call it 'Ode to a Husband Who's Treading on Thin Ice'." She raised the little whistle to her lips and made as if to start playing it.

I recoiled in mock horror. "Save it for the bandits, love; we might need to interrogate them."

Camilla didn't speak to me again until we'd returned to the pub, but delivering the line had been worth it.

When Parida let us through to the kitchen area, I saw that the Black Cats were already gathered there, armed with what I hoped was their best gear. Sasamaru and Sachi turned out to be spear users, while Keita was leaning on a long staff as he stood—albeit one not nearly as nice as Parida's. Ducker was pecking at his menu and seemed to be trying to decide on a short sword, and Tetsuo—who I assumed was the group's tank—had a shield slung on his back and a mace at his side. I nodded, mostly satisfied. Aside from being a bit weak on tanking, it looked like a well-rounded group.

Camilla's eye was a little more critical. "Are you going to be all right like that? Maces and hammers aren't the best choice for a tank. They don't parry as well as a sword or two-handed weapon, and a big part of tanking in SAO is creating openings for your DPS to switch in."

A couple of the Black Cats laughed. "We've been telling Tetsuo that for a while now," Keita said with a grin. "But he's really good with the mace and if we tried to retrain him it'd leave us without any tank at all for a while."

"We don't fight stuff above our level," Sasamaru added. "Against the mobs we usually face it still works pretty well."

Tetsuo reached over and gave Sachi an affectionate pat on the shoulder. "We've been thinking about trying to retrain Sachi here with sword and shield, though. We've got two spear users and Sasamaru's skill is higher." Sachi did not look best pleased when he brought up the subject.

"Hey," Keita suddenly said. "Maybe when we're done bringing the bandits to justice you could show her a few things. I don't think she believes a girl can really tank, and you're living proof of how wrong that is."

"It has nothing to do with being a girl!" Sachi protested. Even when she scowled, she managed to be adorable.

"Damn right it doesn't," Camilla said crossly. "But we can talk about that later—let's get started. Kadyn and I will change and leave through the back door of the pub, just in case the bandits have any green players monitoring the town—and I'd be really surprised if they didn't. Give us about three minutes, and then leave through the front. We'll take the northwest path out of town towards the woods, keeping a leisurely pace and pulling any mobs we encounter on the path. Follow at the same pace, and don't go out of your way to pull anything you don't have to. If you catch sight of us, stop and back off for a minute. If you hear us fighting a mob and I haven't blown the whistle, wait until you don't hear fighting anymore before moving on. And speaking of which…"

A two-note blast echoed off the walls as Camilla raised the _tsuchibue_ to her lips and blew. Everyone's hands flew up to their ears; a few of the Black Cats—and I—winced.

"Sorry," she said. "That's what you're listening for. It should carry pretty far. When you hear that, you start running as fast as you can in our direction. If a mob pops, keep going and train it until it tethers. I'll maneuver so that we catch them between our groups, and hope that they're smart enough to realize that they're outnumbered and outgunned."

"So to speak," I said.

Sachi tugged at her guild leader's sleeve. "Keita, I don't like this. I'm really not okay with the idea of fighting other players. Monsters frighten me enough as it is, and I don't want to hurt anyone."

"It might be best if she sat this out," Camilla remarked. "If her heart's not in it, she could be a liability—to herself and to the rest of you."

Keita put his arm around Sachi's shoulders and squeezed gently. "Sachi, it'll be okay. The idea is to scare the bandits into not fighting, and having one more person there will make it more likely that we _won't_ have to fight. Can you make a scary face?"

Sachi screwed up her face in a way that looked like she was trying to be furious, or perhaps had tasted something utterly foul. The effect was comical.

Keita laughed and hugged her. "You'll be fine. Just don't make that face and they'll be sure to give up."

Camilla looked at me and rolled her eyes a little. I shrugged—it was their call to make. We both opened our equipment menus and started making the necessary changes. First came the cloaks: they were the longest that we could find with hoods, and Camilla at least needed to hide her hair. She unequipped her rare pauldrons and changed to a backup shield; for the most part I was fine but I changed my tunic and pants anyway.

"You going to use that sword?" I asked, pointing at the Anneal Blade that she'd gotten from a first floor quest a while back. It had been upgraded and served her fairly well for the first eight or ten floors, but she'd long since outleveled it and had only resumed using it on this lower floor to save durability on her main weapon.

"Any reason I shouldn't?" she asked.

"Well, yeah," I said. "It's kind of flashy and distinctive-looking. Not all that many people have one. Your best sword actually looks fairly plain and boring to the untrained eye, and it'll make it that much more of a surprise for the bandits if we have to fight."

Camilla sighed, ceding the point. She scrolled through her equipment list until she found _Fate's Mistress_, the rare drop we'd gotten from a named on the 16th floor recently. The glossy black Anneal Blade flickered and disappeared from her back, and in its place was a longsword with an unassuming appearance and a leather-wrapped grip.

"How do I look?" Camilla asked, drawing up her hood and turning in place.

"You realize that's a question with only one safe answer for a husband to give?"

The entire room erupted in laughter. "Yes," Camilla said as she came to a stop. "So give it to me."

"You look lovely, dear," I intoned as if reading from a script. "The loveliest low-level noob I've ever seen."

"Doesn't he say the _sweetest_ things?" she asked the peanut gallery. Ducker and Tetsuo snickered; everyone else wisely kept their silence.

"Okay," I said, waving to the Black Cats. "We're off. You know the plan."

"You can count on us!" Keita said, giving the two of us a thumbs-up.

* * *

The variety of weather that SAO simulated in Aincrad never ceased to amaze me. According to the Black Cats, it had been raining on and off for several weeks, with this last week being the driest for nearly a month—relatively speaking. But the day was overcast when we set out from Taft, with gray clouds obscuring our view of the bottom of the 12th floor high above. We were glad for the cloaks by the time we reached the woods, with stinging needles of rain turning to tiny pebble-like hailstones. It was as if winter, sensing that it was on the verge of being defeated by spring, had decided to strike one last desperate blow for the cause.

If the weather was discouraging, it was discouraging to everyone—it was the better part of two hours before we had our first encounter with the enemy. We had just finished striking down a Taftwood Wasp when I toggled my Searching skill on by habit and caught a glimpse of a pair of orange cursors behind the treeline. Trying not to react, I turned to Camilla and clapped her on the shoulder as if congratulating her for striking the final blow, while muttering a quiet warning pitched only for her ears. "We're not alone."

She nodded and fell into step with me as we slowed our pace and proceeded further down the trail, sheathing her weapon as if nothing was wrong. I knew that she could have it in her hands again in a flash, and approved of the gesture. I did catch her, out of the corner of my eye, casually pulling the whistle from beneath her tunic and letting it hang free.

"Hey," she said suddenly, stopping and turning to me. "Show me what you got from that last mob." She didn't raise her voice much, just enough to carry above the noise of the freezing rain and hail—but I caught what she was doing and opened my inventory menu.

The hook was baited—and it didn't take long to get a nibble. A pair of orange players emerged from the brush on the east side of the trail, their swords already drawn. "Yeah, show us what you got," one of them yelled, trying to be heard. Although the intensity of the inclement weather ebbed from time to time, the hail striking the tree leaves produced a wall of white noise. "And then hand it over."

"All of it," said the other, circling around to block us from heading back in the direction of town. "Slowly."

It was game time. Looking at each other, each holding up one hand as if in surrender, we both navigated to our inventories with our free hands. Rather than dragging anything out and dropping it on the ground, though, we quickly tapped several pre-selected pieces of gear. Camilla's proper shield and pauldrons appeared on her, and I swapped in my real tunic and best dagger. One of the bandits swore loudly and yelled. "We got a couple live ones!"

Responding to that call, two more bandits that I hadn't detected appeared from the other side of the trail, surrounding us. Camilla already had the whistle in her mouth and blew the signal twice, as loud as possible.

"Nobody's around to hear you, bitch," said one of the ones who'd been lying in ambush. "And you're outnumbered two to one."

Camilla threw back her hood to clear her peripheral vision and moved back to back with me, her sword at ready. "There are four of you," she called out. "The way I see it, that _still_ leaves you outnumbered."

A few of the bandits laughed at this bravado, but one of them gave a start as my wife dropped her hood. "Son of a bitch, it's her!" The voice, by now, was quite familiar: it was the swordsman who'd been in the last two groups we'd faced. Now I knew who it was that had dropped out of the group pursuing us; most likely he'd hung back and taken word of what happened with their ambush.

"So?" said one of the bandits, the only one wielding a polearm. The way I saw it, he posed the biggest threat of the lot. "No matter what she says, we still outnumber them two to one. You heard what the boss said—whoever takes them out gets a fat reward. Let's go!"

One of the first bandits who'd appeared hesitated, but the other three rushed in at once. The bandit with the poleaxe was the first to strike, swinging his weapon in a low sweep at her legs. She hopped above the attack and stomped heavily on the shaft of the weapon, her weight yanking it out of his grip. As she landed, I saw her deflect a technique from the swordsman, a flash of green light exploding off of her shield as it absorbed most of the energy from the strike.

And then I had to tear my eyes away from her as a bandit with a short sword lunged directly at me in an impaling attack. I tore my cloak free and threw it at him, tangling him up in the garment while I stabbed twice under his armpit and kicked at the back of his knee to take him down. Unlike the Double Stab technique, it did no damage—but it still delivered an impact, and it's hard to stay on your feet when someone does that.

A terrified scream caught my attention, and I turned just in time to see Camilla deal a mortal blow to the swordsman who'd been bird-dogging us for the last few days. He'd slipped and fallen in the mud, and when he did she drove the edge of the shield down into his neck in a streak of blue light. The blow would've decapitated a person in the real world; in here his remaining HP vanished in an instant, and his avatar scattered into light with a noise that was quickly swallowed by the hail.

Two of the bandits were still on Camilla, and although her HP was still in the green it was getting close to half. I looked around for the one I'd been fighting, and only barely caught the movement out of the corner of my eye as a sword took me in my left arm, a deep numbness bordered by pins and needles washing over the limb. I scrambled backwards, narrowly avoiding the short sword as it plunged into the mud. Unbalanced, the bandit slipped and fell; I delivered a vicious kick to his face and looked around for the fourth bandit.

The misgivings I'd felt about this plan were beginning to return in force, especially once I saw how much HP that one blow had cost me. But just as I was about to shout for my wife to retreat, a group of familiar armed figures rounded the corner in the trail at a run and started yelling to get the attention of our assailants.

Two of the bandits were seriously injured and trying to get to their feet; the third bandit with the polearm had turned and started to flee, but Camilla's shield charge technique took him in the back and sent him sprawling across the muddy ground with a loud cry. With the arrival of the Black Cats and five more weapons now bearing down on them, the three surviving bandits disarmed and surrendered with an anticlimactic lack of further struggle—albeit with a generous helping of profanity.

We made better time on the return trip, both because we'd already cleared mobs as we were going and because we were no longer taking our time. When our prisoner caravan finally reached the edge of the woods, Camilla called us to a stop and took aside the youngest-looking prisoner—the one with the short sword that I'd taken down—and held the tip of her sword just under his chin. The bandit stared at her, goggle-eyed.

"It's your lucky day, boy," she said, steel back in her voice. "Your pals are going to go back to the first floor and have a good long time to sit in jail there. You, on the other hand, get to be a messenger. I want you to sear this into your memory and repeat back to me exactly what I say. Got it?"

He started to nod, eyes dropping to the sword beneath his chin, and then thought better of the motion. "Got it," he whispered.

"You're going to go back to wherever you shitbags camp out, and you're going to give this message to every single orange player you can find on this floor: _you're done here_. From now on, whenever you attack a group of players, you're never going to know if it's going to be the usual noobs you prey on, or if the Valkyrie is going to be there. Maybe I'll be hiding in their group. Maybe I'll be in the woods nearby. Maybe I'll show up just when you think you've won. I will be actively _hunting_ anyone with an orange cursor, and when I find them, they'd best hope their weapons hit the ground before I start swinging. If you're smart, you'll go find a deep hole to crawl into until your cursor turns green again, and try to forget you ever thought this line of work was a good idea."

She waited while the bandit repeated her words, corrected him as he stuttered and stumbled over them and forced him to do it again, and then nodded. "One more thing," she said, her eyes boring into his as she lifted his chin with her sword. Her voice dropped to a deadly whisper, and I saw a speck of glowing red pixels where the point of her sword nicked him. "You tell your boss that this red-haired Valkyrie knows exactly who he is, and that if he sticks around here I will make him _beg_ to be sent to that cushy prison in the Starting City before I kill him."

* * *

One of the Black Cats had procured some rope, which we used to bind the hands of our two remaining prisoners behind their backs. They'd conducted the walk back to Taft in sullen silence, and I was grateful not to have to think of anything to say in response to them—not least because I suspected my wife would probably be none too gentle about shutting them up. This whole bandit problem had brought out a side of her I'd seldom seen before, and I wasn't yet sure how I felt about it. She seemed to be enjoying her role entirely too much for my peace of mind.

It wasn't that the plan hadn't gone well—it had, for the most part. But it was the sort of trick that could only work for so long, and maybe not even once again. The message she'd hammered into the bandit had stayed with me as well, and I spent some time mulling over just what she'd meant by "actively hunting" orange players—and where I fit into that plan of attack.

I suspected we were going to be discussing all of this before too long, once we were done dropping off our prisoners.

As we approached the warp gate on the edge of the Taft city limits, we began to draw a crowd. Players hanging out near the teleport landing pointed and stared at the large group of green players pushing along a pair of bound and injured criminals, and more than one ran back into town, shouting. A loud burbling murmur of conversation rolled through the players present, but I couldn't pick out anything except a word here and there. Nobody approached or addressed us.

Keita and some of the Black Cats wanted to accompany us to the Starting City in case we needed any help, but Camilla waved them off. "I really appreciate your help today, but I think we can handle escorting these two sorry specimens to jail. Go and get your guild some warm drinks and let Parida know everything went well; hopefully we'll be back in a few hours and we can talk about what we're going to do from here."

We both shook hands with Keita, and stepped back onto the warp gate platform, seizing hold of our charges by their bonds. With the Black Cats waving their goodbyes to us, Camilla and I turned to each other, and as one we said: "Teleport: Starting City!"


	8. Prisoner Transfer

It was the very first time we'd returned to the Starting City since we left the first floor. We hadn't discussed it, so I wasn't sure exactly what our plan was once we got here—and I was betting that Camilla didn't know either; we'd never really been apart in this game and I knew she couldn't have any better idea of what was in store for us here than I did.

I didn't even know for certain where we were going to appear when we used the warp gate in Taft. If we were very unlucky, we could end up far from Black Iron Castle and be forced to escort our prisoners past the NPC guards in the city—and how they'd react to our presence alongside a pair of criminal players was anyone's guess. If we were _very_ unlucky, we might find ourselves treated as criminals ourselves for being in their company, and I didn't really care for the idea of having to try to explain ourselves to NPCs—which, all else being equal, were not known for their grasp of nuance.

I'd wanted to raise these concerns with Camilla as we approached Taft, but there just hadn't been a good opportunity to do so privately. But as the unsettling discontinuity of teleportation passed and the blinding flare of blue light began to fade, we found ourselves in an area that was reassuringly familiar: the central plaza of the Starting City, a massive courtyard with a tall clock tower in the center. It was the place where everyone had first spawned when they entered the game, the place where Kayaba Akihito had summoned us all at 5:30 PM on November 6th of last year to explain just how very screwed we all were.

No NPC guards were anywhere in sight. For that matter, even the number of players in sight was quite small: a few dozen at most, some of them shockingly young and not wearing any kind of armor. I hadn't expected a huge crowd; according to the Weekly Argo news sheets the population of the Starting City was maybe three or four thousand players spread across a city designed to comfortably house at least twice that number.

But the children playing in the plaza were… well, _children_. I had to focus on them to make sure that yes, they really were _players_, and not just NPCs added to the city to give it life and flavor. Some, to my eye, were possibly as young as ten years old—far below the purported minimum age for SAO. They had no business being in this adult virtual world even as a game—let alone being trapped in such a Death Game.

My wife and I had never had children, had never wanted any—but it was heartbreaking to look at these kids, ripped from parents and families that loved them, and think of their bodies lying in a coma-like state in a hospital bed somewhere, trapped in here until either they were killed or someone cleared this game.

When I thought about it that way, perhaps after all it was best that they were here in the Starting City, clad in civilian clothing and playing as if they had no cares or worries. The alternative was to think that they were venturing outside the Safe Zone, fighting monsters and at risk for predators like the ones we were currently fighting to defeat.

An elbow dug into my ribs, and I realized I'd been off in the land of the Forest Elves—it was a good thing I still had a hand firmly on the knot of the rope binding the hands of the bandit in front of me. Camilla looked at me with a question in her eyes. When I jerked my head in the direction of the gaggle of kids playing in the plaza, a profoundly sad expression consumed her as she nodded slowly. "Let's go," she said, turning away from the sight.

We stepped down off the teleportation dais at the base of the clock tower, and began heading across the plaza towards the adjacent Black Iron Castle—supposedly the home of the guild now known colloquially as The Army. Just as in Taft, we were drawing more than a few stares: orange players normally wouldn't enter towns for fear of being attacked by the NPC guards—or by other players, who could attack them with impunity.

Looking over in the direction of the children again, I saw a slender young woman with glasses who looked like a librarian or schoolteacher of some sort; she was gathering up all of the kids as she cast worried looks in our direction. She began herding them all out of the plaza and away from our procession, looking back over her shoulder frequently. The idea of being a source of fear for her ate at me, but I couldn't blame her—and after I thought about it, the fact that those kids had someone looking out for their safety actually made me feel a little better.

"Stop right there!" The shout brought me immediately out of my thoughts, and brought the four of us to a halt as we approached the gates of Black Iron Castle. Several figures in heavy plate armor were running at us from across the plaza, and being able to tell that they were players rather than hard-coded NPC guards did not do much to ease my mind, given the way they were behaving. The guards all had weapons at ready; neither Camilla nor I had ours out, and drawing them seemed like a really, really bad idea—we had to wait and see what happened.

"Explain yourselves!" barked one of the guards as they surrounded us. Two of them stepped aside as a fifth guard approached from the direction of the Castle, the cloak over one shoulder suggesting rank. When I focused closely on them, I saw the Army guild symbol beside their HP gauges.

I reached out and set a hand on Camilla's arm to urge calm; I could see her getting angry at the reaction we were getting. "We captured these bandits when they attacked us on the 11th floor," I replied, trying to keep a quaver out of my voice. "We understand you have a prison here, and it seemed better to bring them here than to execute them outright."

None of the weapons pointed at the four of us wavered. The armor worn by these people made it extremely unsettling to have a conversation with them; their helmets had visors with absurdly tiny vent holes covering their faces above the nose, which made it impossible to see their eyes or anything but their scowls. I couldn't understand how _they_ could see anything through them.

The officer—I was pretty sure that was what he was—was silent for a few moments as his head turned to look at each of us in turn. Finally, he gestured towards two of his men, who roughly took custody of our prisoners; the other two guards took up station behind us.

"You will come with me," said the officer curtly. It wasn't a request.

"Excuse me?" said Camilla, forming a fist as her voice rose.

"If you have excuses," the officer replied with no change in tone, "you will present them to our Commander. Come."

"Peace," I said quietly to my wife. "Let's see what their leader has to say. Rumor has it he used to run MTD and if that's the case, I exchanged emails with him once or twice back in the world. He didn't seem like a bad guy." MTD was MMO Today, a popular strategy and gaming news site that Camilla and I used to read near-religiously.

One of the Army guards reached towards Camilla's arm to take custody of her the same way the others had the bandits; the glare she leveled at him froze him in place. "Touch me," she hissed, "and I will put you flat on your back with your sword up your ass and _then_ challenge you to a duel." His face colored beneath the visor; a couple of the other guards snickered.

"Silence!" the officer roared at his men, who complied instantly. Turning to us, he growled out, "If you come without resistance, you will not be harmed."

"We will accompany you of our own free will," I said, staring the officer directly in his visor and hoping the effect carried through it. "But let's dispense with the bullshit bravado: you can't harm us within the city Safe Zone, nor can you physically force us to go anywhere without triggering the anti-harassment code—we are green and have committed no crime. Now show us to your commander."

Escorted by the fuming officer and two guards, Camilla and I entered Black Iron Castle. I could tell she was nothing short of furious at the treatment we were getting, and as we walked I reached out to take her hand. She squeezed it once and glanced over at me, giving me a tight smile. "I'm fine," she seethed, not sounding fine at all.

"I know," I said quietly. "Why don't you let me start out talking to their leader? If it really is the MTD guy, I might be able to make a connection with him."

"And you think I'm liable to tear his head off."

"Beloved," I said without a trace of irony in my voice, "I would not dream of insulting you that way."

She snorted and stuck out her tongue, but the smile that she gave me afterwards was sincere. "Alright. You take the lead on this one, then."

"Silence!" barked the officer again.

"Fuck you, Captain Crunch," Camilla shot back in English, unable to restrain herself.

The reference seemed to go right over the officer's head, but pretty much anyone in Japan with any exposure to pop culture had heard the f-bomb at least once and knew what it meant. The officer whirled, gauntleted fists clenched. Camilla stared flatly at him, as if daring him to try. After a few seconds of this staring contest, the Army player turned with a snarl and continued onward.

Taking a side passage, we rose through a wide spiral staircase and ascended what must have been several levels, emerging finally in a curved hallway with widely spaced doors along the outer walls. One of those doors had a pair of guards in what seemed to be the official Army uniform, and they stiffened to attention as our procession approached, one of them opening the door and stepping aside.

The room was shaped like a curved rectangle, luxuriously furnished and easily thirty meters wide with a wide array of bay windows set into the outer wall, which looked out over the plaza nearly on level with the top of the clock tower. Sitting behind an immense hardwood desk stained a deep cherry-brown color was a man who looked to be around the same age as my wife and I—in his late twenties, maybe. His light brown hair—assuming it was his default style—looked like it had been just on the verge of needing to be cut when he'd entered SAO, with a little bit of length in the back that was almost to the point of what Camilla would call a "mullet". Well-kept sideburns tapered down his cheeks, and his eyes were a deep forest green that was several shades darker than the sea-green of the Army uniform he wore.

Standing beside him as they went over what looked like a pile of paperwork was an absolutely stunning woman who might have been just a touch taller than him if they'd both been standing up straight, with eyes of the same icy blue as my wife's. Despite the exotic silver-white color of her hair, she was young—probably younger than him, although it was hard to say given the artificially flawless skin of most avatars—and even tied up into a topknot it still reached down to her waist; had it been unbound it might well have brushed the backs of her calves. I wondered if her real hair was like that; if so, it must have taken her at least an hour to maintain every day back in the real world. Camilla had once had her hair as far down as her waist, and taking care of it was far more effort than she'd cared to expend.

As we entered, the two people behind the desk raised their eyes from the papers in front of them. The officer in front of us saluted. "Commander, these two players warped into the city accompanied by a pair of orange players. The criminals are on their way to the dungeons as we speak; we took these two into custody and brought them before you to answer for their actions."

"Now _wait just a minute_—" Camilla began.

"You will speak when spoken to!" barked the officer again.

"Corbatz!" said the man behind the desk with the sharp voice of authority, coming to his feet. "That will do. Leave us and we will get to the bottom of this."

"But Commander," Corbatz protested, "these players are armed; I cannot allow them to be left alone with you—"

"That's enough, Sergeant," said the silver-haired woman calmly. "We are within the city Safe Zone. No harm can be done here. Now leave us."

We couldn't see Corbatz's eyes as he turned and passed us on his way out of the room, but I was willing to bet the look he gave us was not a friendly one. As the door shut behind us, I bowed respectfully to the man behind the desk and spoke as politely as I could. "I am Kadyn, and this is my wife Camilla. I apologize for the misunderstanding and inconvenience, but there is far more to the circumstances than the lack of nuance in your Sergeant's explanation would suggest."

"Why am I not surprised?" asked the Commander with a dry tone that implied a sense of humor lurking under the severe exterior.

"Please, sit," said the silver-haired woman, gesturing to a pair of comfortable-looking chairs that faced the desk. When we had done so, the Commander returned to his own seat while the woman remained standing at his side.

"I am Thinker," he said. "This is my second-in-command, Yurielle."

"Is Corbatz always such a dick?" Camilla blurted before I could respond.

Yurielle covered a slight snicker with one delicate hand. Thinker's expression was unchanged. "I apologize for any uncivil behavior on the part of our Sergeant. He's been… understandably distressed since the 25th floor boss raid. As have we all."

I remembered reading about it a few weeks prior in the news sheets. "You lost a lot of people there. I'm sorry."

Thinker inclined his head. "I thank you for that. We did indeed take terrible losses in that battle—most of our best troops. Corbatz lost his entire unit, and that weighs on a man."

Nodding, I tried to recall what I'd read of the battle. "From what I heard, it was a hell of a difficulty spike from the previous floor. I wasn't there."

The use of the term _difficulty spike_, in English, caught Thinker's attention. Both of his eyebrows shot up. "You're a gamer. You'd be surprised how uncommon that is in SAO—for at least half of the players I've met, this was the first game they'd ever bought or played."

"We both are," Camilla said, most of her anger seeming to fade in response to Thinker and Yurielle's civility. "We've been married for ten years and gaming together even before that."

Both players across the desk smiled upon hearing this; Yurielle's had a hint of something more as she glanced down at Thinker briefly.

"Thinker," I said. "Are the rumors that you used to run MTD true?"

As I asked my question, Thinker's face broke into a wide smile and he dropped into a more casual tone. "That's me. Or was, anyway; who knows what's happening to my web site now. You're readers?"

I nodded. "You might not remember this, but I emailed you a long time ago with a few links to threads on the Fulldive forums, shortly after SAO was first announced. My email display name would've been the same as my character name: Kadyn."

A light went on behind Thinker's eyes. "Ah! I do remember, actually. I had my own account on and was already aware of the threads, but we exchanged a few mails after that. I don't recall what we discussed, I'm sorry."

I grinned. "That's okay, neither do I. I just remember being thrilled to get a response."

Thinker chuckled, and then cleared his throat, composing his face into seriousness. "All right. Suppose you explain, then, what Corbatz meant by you bringing orange players into the city."

I explained, as succinctly as I could, how we'd learned of the growing bandit problem on the 11th floor, and how we thought it tied into the involvement of an actual PKer with whom we'd tangled before. Both Thinker and Yurielle wore increasingly troubled expressions as they listened, and Yurielle's eyes widened a little when we described the plan we hatched to capture bandits and bring them here.

"We'd heard that there was a prison here in the Starting City," I explained, "and that your guild had been focusing on maintaining order in the city ever since your losses on the 25th floor."

"That's true," Thinker replied, nodding. "There are dungeons below this castle—_real_ dungeons, I mean, not the kind you adventure in. The anti-harassment code is capable of teleporting repeat offenders to the cells in this dungeon automatically, but we discovered that the empty cell doors could be locked and unlocked from the outside. We've started using it to imprison orange players that we capture."

"But I think this may be the first time any player has actually brought a prisoner here from somewhere else," Yurielle added. "We don't really have a protocol for dealing with it, and Corbatz must have assumed the worst."

"No offense," Camilla said with mild annoyance, "but that was kind of asinine of him. We had their hands bound behind their backs and we were holding the rope. I'm not sure how much clearer we could've made it that they were prisoners."

Thinker splayed his hands in a gesture of _shikata nai_—conveying that there wasn't much that could be done to change that now. "I'll issue orders clarifying that captive orange players brought here by green players are to be taken to the dungeon, and their captors paid a bounty. Perhaps that will encourage others to help cut down on the bandit problem as you did."

"Sir," said Yurielle with an expression of mild concern, "are you sure it's wise to encourage that? These two took a terrible risk, and from the sound of it almost got killed in the process."

"We can take care of ourselves," Camilla said firmly. "We won't say no to being paid for bringing in these scum, but our focus is on solving the bandit epidemic on the 11th floor."

An idea had been taking shape in my head, and as I listened to the back-and-forth between Camilla and the two Army officials, I raised a hand. "Begging your pardon, Thinker, but: am I correct in thinking that you'd like to expand the Army's influence, to work on recruiting replacements for your casualties and helping keep order on these lower floors?"

Thinker nodded slowly. "That is so. I—" He paused, and then smiled. "I think I see where this is going."

"And you're probably right," I said, returning the smile. "Wouldn't it be outstanding PR for the Army to be seen protecting low-level players and solving a criminal problem that threatens the safety of all players?"

Camilla gave me a slightly wounded expression. "You don't think we can handle this, Kadyn?"

"No," I said, holding her gaze. "I really don't. I think we're in over our heads and that we'd be _idiots_ not to seek and accept any help we can get."

A flicker of anger passed across Camilla's eyes; there and gone in an instant. What it left behind was a frosty look that promised we'd be discussing this later. That was a discussion I was very prepared to have—and to bring up if she didn't do so first.

As I turned back to Thinker, he steepled his fingers on the desk in front of him and gave me a measured look. "All right," he said as Yurielle opened a note-taking window. "What did you have in mind?"


	9. Cloak and Dagger

"I'm still not speaking to you," Camilla said crossly as the blue light of the teleportation effect faded away and left us standing on the landing platform just outside of Taft. The planning and negotiations with Thinker had taken much longer than we'd expected, and it was getting on towards late evening. The rain and hail had ended at some point while we were away, but moody gray clouds still dominated the sky and there was a sharp chill in the air that magnified every time a gust of wind blew in from the foothills.

Camilla's mood had been a match for the weather ever since we left Black Iron Castle. After more than ten years together, it was hardly the first argument we'd had—nor even the worst. But she was pissed, and on some level I recognized that she had a right to be… even if it wasn't entirely fair. I'd proposed my idea to the Army without consulting her, and it had undercut her own plan for taking the fight to the bandits herself.

But this wasn't really out of the blue, not in my mind. I'd been putting a lot of thought into this over the last day, particularly with regard to what was bothering me about Camilla's behavior. I'd never really been good at realtime face-to-face arguments, not the way she was. But if I took the time to reason things out and plan my words, I could usually put together a fairly solid one—provided the conversation didn't take any unexpected turns that I hadn't anticipated or thought through in advance.

"Fine," I said as we entered the town and walked down the street towards the inn where we were still staying. "I'll speak, you can listen—and if you decide you have anything to say, I'll listen to that too. Fair?"

She said nothing. Silence was acquiescence in this case, and I went on.

"Ever since Weilan Marsh, you've been acting different—taking worse risks, being unusually short with me, and making plans that assume my help without asking me. I was willing to go along with the trap you set with the Black Cats because it was a reasonably sound plan. But what you're trying to do isn't just about solving the bandit problem here—you're trying to turn us into vigilantes. I don't want any part of that. You want to be a hero, Camilla, and it's going to get us _killed_."

"You really think that's what this is about?" Camilla said, stopping abruptly and grabbing my shoulder as she looked me in the eye. "You really think this is about being a hero?"

Of the many differences between my wife and me, one of the most basic has always been her direct, confrontational nature—whereas I've always disliked open conflict. Some of that was because of where each of us was born and raised, but in both of our cases these stereotypical ethnic traits were magnified—in large part because of who we were as individuals. I forced myself to hold her intense gaze, forced myself to respond firmly and with equal directness.

"Some of it, yes—but not entirely. I think it's also about revenge and absolution. I think you want both for Niara and Reznor's deaths, and you think you can get that by hunting down the bandits here and getting a chance at taking out the player who was truly responsible for their deaths."

"Don't you?" she shot back, almost yelling. It wasn't anger that I heard in her voice; it was something else and it was painful to hear. "Don't you want that too, Kadyn?"

"What makes you think I don't?" I asked, ignoring the stares from the players passing us in the street. "There isn't a day I don't think about what happened down there in some way. But that bandit kid you scared the life out of earlier? He didn't kill Niara. The bandits harassing the players on this floor, they didn't do that either. They're being used, and probably by the person who _did _kill her. Exterminating them won't bring back our friends."

"No," she responded tersely, and this time the anger had returned. "But it'd be a good start. And getting rid of them would put a stop to all the harassment that's going on here."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I stared at my wife, drawing out the words as I said them. "So would the plan I offered to the Army. These aren't aggro mobs we're talking about, Camilla—they're _people_. Human beings with families, people who will _die_ when their avatar does. You understood that once. How many people have you killed in this world so far? With your own hands?"

"Four," she said instantly, without a trace of doubt or hesitation.

"It used to bother you. The first time it almost tore you apart."

Silence. Camilla's eyes were locked on mine, flecks of ice in a face gone pale. "You think it doesn't?" she asked finally, voice nearly a whisper. "You think I don't remember each of their faces? Why do you think I didn't even have to think about the number?"

I didn't have an answer for that. We started walking again; the inn wasn't far and the rain was starting to pick up again.

"Being bothered by the necessity of a distasteful thing doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you do it when it needs to be done," she went on when I didn't say anything.

"And what if it doesn't?" I asked. "What if there's another way? Ask yourself this, Rebecca: if you could wave your hand and solve the bandit problem here in one of two ways, one of which involved killing off the orange players and the other of which didn't involve killing anyone... would you take the option that saved more lives? Answer that, and I think you'll have a better idea of what your real priorities are here."

The sound of her name snapped my wife's gaze back to me. I didn't turn to look, but I could feel her eyes on me. After a few moments of this, I heard her reply—and it wasn't an answer to the question I'd asked. "They're not going to leave us alone, Seiji. They made this personal. If we don't hit them, and hit them _hard_, they're going to keep coming after us and we're never going to know when until it happens. We know they're _here_ right now. We don't know if we're going to get another chance like this."

We stopped before the door to the inn, taking partial shelter under the awning. "Let's assume you're right," I said. "What part of that means you have to do it alone?"

"But I don't," she insisted, stepping towards me and taking both of my hands. "I want _us_ to do it _together_."

"But we can't," I said simply, bringing her hands up to my chest and holding them there. "And there's no reason that we should have to. I love you and I'd protect you with my life, and you _know_ that. But you still haven't given me a single reason why getting Thinker's help is a bad idea. You were perfectly happy to bring in the Black Cats to help, but for some reason this is different? Why?"

"It's different because—" Camilla stopped in midsentence, the reply coming to her lips before her thoughts had finished.

"Because?" I prompted, releasing her hands and stepping aside to get out of the way as a group of players exited the inn.

I could see her thinking it through, trying to form the argument. When seconds passed and she hadn't answered, I said, "Because the Black Cats were the little guys helping the Valkyrie take the fight to the enemy, but with the Army _we're_ just the little guys calling in the cavalry to deal with something we can't handle?" I tried to keep my voice neutral, but it was hard to keep some of the scorn I felt for the idea from leaking through.

She glared at me. "Now you're being insulting."

"Am I wrong?" I asked.

More silence stretched on, an uncomfortable quiet broken only by the patter of the rain on the canvas awning above us. "I don't know," she said finally, turning and opening the door to get out of the rain.

We let the subject drop once we were inside, renewing our rental of the inn room and going upstairs to warm up a little and change back into city clothes. Our conversation was limited largely to simple sentences when a question needed to be answered; the closest thing we came to a nonessential conversation was when Camilla asked me if I thought she should wear the blue dress she'd had on the night before or the deep wine-red one that showed a little more cleavage. I thought the blue dress was a better color for her, but being a longtime fan of anything that showed my wife's figure in a flattering way, I went with the red. In truth, I could've gone either way—I was just happy to have her ask my opinion about something like that; it felt indirectly like a step towards mending fences.

When it came time to head over to the pub, though, Camilla asked me to go on ahead without her.

"Are you sure?" I asked. Arguments to the contrary aside, we loved each other's company and were almost always together. There were times when it felt like it bordered on unhealthy codependence, but we'd talked it over more than once and come to the conclusion that it was more a fear we both shared of being alone in this world—of losing track of one another and something unexpected happening.

Sitting on the bed in her pretty red dress and staring pensively into the fireplace as the virtual flame cast flickering shadows across the room, she looked up and gave me a weak but sincere smile. "It's fine. I just need some time with my own thoughts. I'll catch up with you there in a little bit."

I crossed the room and set my hands on her shoulders, leaning over and kissing the top of her head. "Okay. Send me a PM if you need anything. Love you."

She reached up and briefly covered one of my hands with hers. "Love you too. If anyone asks, just tell them I needed a nap. It's not far from the truth."

It wasn't the first time we'd been apart since being trapped in SAO, but it wasn't exactly a common occurrence—not for more than a few minutes, anyway. I always felt odd when it happened, the absence of our usual back-and-forth banter or wordless exchanges hitting me like a radio station that was always on suddenly being silenced. Inevitably there were moments when I'd see something that struck me funny and caught myself turning to point it out to someone who wasn't there, or I'd go on autopilot while deep in thought for an extended period of time and realize that minutes had passed and no one had been there to snap me out of it.

Maybe it was healthy to have some time apart now and then after all.

The rain was back in force when I opened the inn door, coming down in wind-driven sheets that advanced down the street like ranks of marching soldiers. I stopped underneath the awning and opened my menu to equip the cloak I'd bought for my wife's plan, and grimaced when I noticed a large hole where the bandit's sword had punched through it when I'd used it as a distraction. It was better than nothing; I just wanted to keep the rain out of my face during the short walk next door.

The downpour was loud enough that I almost didn't hear the quiet voice that called out to me from the darkness of the narrow alley separating the inn from the pub. I stopped, cocking my head and looking around, and then thought to toggle on my Searching skill. Immediately the green cursor of another player sprang up within the alley, surprisingly close but hanging over the head of someone who was still out of sight. "Who's there?" I called, approaching the mouth of the alley.

Slowly, tentatively, a figure moved forward just enough to catch some of the ambient street light. A cloak not too different from mine—aside from the holes—covered a head with features I could only barely tell were feminine, or at least androgynous.

"Can we talk, please?" the person asked, the voice confirming her gender. Something about it was familiar, but I couldn't place it.

"We can talk out here," I said, a little uneasy with the whole cloak-and-dagger routine—the "cloak" part was quite literal and I wasn't eager to find out whether or not there was a dagger involved.

"I can't," she said, stepping back as her voice took on a note of pleading. "Please. You're in a Safe Zone; there's nothing I or anyone else can do to you here. But _they_ have eyes in the town and I don't want to be seen talking to you."

Then I realized why it was the voice sounded familiar. "Viyami," I said.

I thought I caught the faintest hint of a smile in the shadows that still mostly covered her. "You remembered my name. I didn't think you would."

"I remember you and your boyfriend tried to mug us," I pointed out, still standing where there was light.

"And I remember you saved our lives."

I toggled Searching on again, just to be sure of what I was seeing. She must have noticed the luminous color sheeting over my eyes when I did. "Yes, I'm green. For lesser crimes the orange goes away pretty quickly, and no matter what you think, I've never killed anyone."

That made one of us—in a flash I remembered the bandit I'd killed during the pursuit in the swamp; it had been my first time and I hadn't allowed myself think about it too much since. A little nervously, I looked around to see if anyone was there to see—no one with any sense was out in this weather—and took a step into the alley. "What do you want from me, Viyami?"

I vaguely saw her head turn within the shadows of the cloak, and she withdrew another few steps into obscurity when a pair of players emerged from the pub in a loud conversation. "I wanted to give you a warning: I think they're planning to set a trap for you and the Red Valkyrie."

It only took me a moment to process what she meant by _Akai Varukirii_. "Who's 'they'?"

"They… he…" She trailed off slightly, and I could hear genuine fear in her voice as she lowered it to a whisper, even here in the alley with the rain beating down and making it impossible for anyone beyond us to have heard. "There are two of them. They showed up several weeks ago with a handful of orange players we'd never seen before. Mostly other desperate people—people like us. These two, though… they're different from the others. Meaner, crueler. They like to kill, and they don't seem to care who. Especially _him_."

She didn't specify who she meant by _him_. I thought I could take a pretty good guess. I'd privately had my doubts regarding our assumptions about who was behind the bandit epidemic here, but any such doubts vanished as Viyami kept talking.

"Before they came, there were only a few of us. Most of us knew who each other were, if by faces if not by names, but we usually kept our distance from each other. We were just trying to get by, not hurt anyone. I think for these two though, hurting people is _the whole point_."

"If it's who I think it is," I said slowly, "then that's exactly the point. And they're trying to find others like them."

Viyami nodded, and then looked down at her feet. "I think you're right. They took over, and started organizing us into parties. Discouraging us from leaving survivors, giving us assigned areas to hunt."

"You mentioned a trap," I said, trying to steer the conversation back to what I most wanted to learn. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know much," she replied. "I overheard Mallek talking about it, but not any of the details. Ever since Yarritt came back with that message that the Valkyrie made him memorize, I know they've had people watching the town, waiting for you to leave."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" I asked, suddenly suspicious.

The only sound for a few beats was that of the rain. "You were kind to me when you had no reason to be," she said finally. "And you saved Mallek when you didn't have to. Mallek… he didn't used to be the way he was when you saw him; the way he is now. He's changed. Almost everyone's changed, whether they wanted to or not. And those of us who haven't… we're too scared to do anything about it."

_But not too scared to sneak out at night and rat on them_, I thought. "What will you do now?"

"I-I don't know," she said, voice trembling. "I want to get Mallek out of there. I want to just pick another floor for us to go to, somewhere we can start over, but he's still orange—and I don't know how long he'll stay that way, especially if he keeps on working for _them_. I volunteered for duty as one of the people watching the town so I'd have an excuse to stay green. But he's part of the hunting parties."

I then knew what I wanted to ask. "Okay, listen to me. You know that your best chance to get out of this is to get rid of the two players who changed everything, right? We need you to keep your eyes and ears open, and tell us anything that you think will help. You don't have to risk coming to us—if you go to the pub next door and ask the waitress to give us a message, she will. Or if you can't go in through the front door, knock on the back door—I'll tell Parida to expect it, and why."

I could see her shifting uncomfortably in the shadows; hear the doubt in her voice. "I don't know if I can—"

She gasped quietly, startled as I took a brisk step towards her. I stopped just short of grabbing her by the shoulders, forcing my hands back to my sides. "Viyami, _listen_. And think. There is _no_ chance that what's happening on this floor will end well for you or Mallek if you stay here and let this go on. None. If you can convince him to run away somewhere, more power to you—_do it_. But if you're going to stay… then your only chance to get out of this is to help us. Please."

If my eyes hadn't adjusted enough to be able to pick out the outlines of her cloak and the ambient light as it reflected off the wetness on her face, I almost could've missed the fact that she was still there. She didn't answer for a long time, and I was about to turn and leave when she finally did.

"Okay. I'll do what I can. That's all I can promise."

"That's all I can ask," I replied. But by then she was already running down the alley. The darkness swallowed her, and then the rain did the same for her receding footsteps.


	10. Middle Ground

"It's a trap, you know."

I restrained a powerful urge to make a joke that had already been beaten to death by the time my wife and I were in high school, and which had just started to make the rounds again when SAO launched. Old Internet memes never seemed to die, but they eventually stopped being funny. Usually. "Which do you mean?" I asked quietly, leaning over the pub table so that I didn't have to raise my voice to be heard. "The actual trap, or Viyami's warning about it?"

"Yes," Camilla replied helpfully, not looking up from her inventory as she sipped at a mug of black coffee.

I rolled my eyes a little and stirred my soup with my chopsticks, chasing the last elusive bit of meat. I found myself briefly distracted by the sound; after four months in this game the realism of the little details sometimes still caught my attention. They made the occasional reminders of our virtual environment that much more of a stark contrast. "I'm just not seeing it. What would they gain by sending her here to give us a fake warning?"

"I don't know," Camilla said after swiping a window closed with a wave of her hand, finally raising her eyes to mine. "But we'd be idiots to take what she said at face value."

Meaning _I_ was being an idiot. I tried not to take offense; we still hadn't resolved the earlier argument and it seemed to still be bothering her despite a couple hours of rest under her belt. "Okay," I said. "Let's assume she's lying through her teeth. Where's the trap?"

We kept our voices low to avoid spreading our conversation outside of our table; not everyone in the pub was known to us, and the lack of the Black Cats' presence meant things were relatively quiet. But despite the lengthy silence from my wife, I knew she had to have heard me. I was just about to add a new thought when she finally spoke up.

"I think they're trying to scare us off. Make us afraid to leave the Safe Zone." The corner of her mouth quirked once. "They don't know me as well as they think."

I chewed on that for a moment, and then shook my head. "I'm still not seeing it. If they sent her, they've tipped their hand for nothing. It doesn't lure us into doing anything we weren't already going to do, and it gives us a warning that we didn't have before. If they wanted to set a trap for us, wouldn't it have been more effective just to wait until we left town and hit us unawares?"

"I do not credit these people with an excess of strategic genius," Camilla remarked as she finished her coffee and set the mug down with a sharp rap of ceramic against wood. "People are irrational and they make mistakes, Kadyn; their actions don't necessarily have to be logically sound. "

I shrugged doubtfully, not wanting to argue. "Okay, fine. It's a trap. Now what?"

"Isn't it obvious? We set one of our own."

I tried—and failed—to keep from rolling my eyes again. I saw the irritation flash across her face, and raised a hand to forestall the sharp retort that was sure to follow. "Or," I suggested, "maybe we could try sticking to the plan we worked out with the Army."

"That _you_ worked out. I don't recall having much input into it."

That hit a bit too close to the mark. But it wasn't the whole truth, and I was starting to get annoyed with her attitude. "You were sitting right beside me, Camilla. You had exactly as much input as you chose to offer. I'm sorry that I brought up that idea without running it past you—but to be fair, you didn't exactly go out of your way to get my opinion before you decided to put both of our lives on the line by turning us into vigilantes. When do I get to not be okay with that?"

And after rolling that grenade out onto the table, I waited for the expected explosion as my wife's cheeks reddened and her expression clouded. It left me completely unprepared for what she said a few seconds later as she damped down her temper with visible effort.

"You're right. I'm sorry."

I'd gamed this conversation out about five steps ahead—I had to do that; it was the only way I could handle an argument like this in realtime. I had responses I'd thought up for pretty much every objection I expected from her, and even a few lines that I'd hoped would neutralize her temper if it flared up.

What I hadn't expected was contrition. It left me sitting there, looking at her stupidly with my mouth slightly open. "I… okay?"

Camilla combed through her hair with her fingers, pulling it back to get it out of her face as she met my eyes. "I just... dealing with these people again kind of brought everything back that we'd tried so hard to put behind us. I got scared and angry, and I wanted to hit back at them. I still do—honestly, I don't think they're ever going to leave us alone unless someone takes them out or we hit them hard enough to make them back off. We can't run away from this." It was much the same thing she'd said before, but this time it felt different—in tone, in context; it was less like an aggressive call to arms and more like an appeal to a partner for help in solving a serious problem.

I could deal with that.

"All the more reason for us to get as many allies as we can," I said. "Someone from the Army will be here in the morning. Recruiting from the town and organizing a local militia to patrol the major roads and paths will go a long way towards making this floor safer." There was more I wanted to say, but I cut myself off there—I didn't want to jeopardize this progress by making her feel like I was rubbing her face in it.

Camilla nodded, looking down at the table with a look of—not resignation, which had been my first thought, but something else. Weariness, perhaps. "It's just frustrating, Kadyn," she said finally, idly playing with the lacing on the sleeves of her dress while she spoke. "I don't like leaving our safety—or the lives of the people on this floor—in the hands of people we don't really know. I can't just sit here and hope the Army makes the problem go away—I need to be doing something about it."

"What's this about the Army?" Hinami said as she approached the table and offered us drink refills. "Don't mind me, I'm being nosy."

_Yes, you are. _I looked over at Camilla and shrugged. Everyone was going to know tomorrow anyway. As my wife exchanged her empty coffee cup for a fresh one, she explained. "Kady—_we_ spoke with the leader of the Army while we were in the Starting City. They're going to assign a group to patrol the major traffic areas on this floor and start organizing a militia from the local residents.

"That's… good, I hope?" Hinami replied, looking between us as if unsure of what to think about this development.

"It should be," I answered, not missing Camilla's quick self-correction. "If they can get regular patrols going not just with their guild but with volunteers from the players who live here, it could make this floor too much trouble for the bandits to feel it's worth sticking around. And the patrols might just be able to round some of them up while they're at it."

As I said this, I caught Camilla suddenly getting the light of revelation in her eyes. She slapped a hand on the table, making her coffee slosh and startling both me and the waitress. "I've got it. Hinami, I'm sorry, could you give us a few more minutes to talk?"

"Sure thing, hon," she said, immediately sweeping up the empty mugs and finding somewhere else to be.

"What's on your mind?" I asked cautiously once we were alone again—at least, as alone as we could get with more people starting to fill up the pub. I could tell it was going to be a busy night; players who might've gone out in large groups hunting during the slower evening hours were being driven inside by the miserable weather.

Meanwhile, Camilla looked about as smug and excited as if she'd just discovered a cure for cancer. "I think I know how to make everyone happy here."

"I like the sound of this already," I said over my tea with arched eyebrows. "Figure that out, and you could bottle and sell it for a fortune."

"Funny. I mean I think I figured out a compromise to reconcile your Army plan with my need to be doing something."

"And?"

"Simple," she said, grinning as she brought her coffee up to her lips. "I join the Army."

Alarm bells went off in my head. "I changed my mind," I said at once. "I don't like this plan."

"I know, I know," my wife said, holding up a hand in supplication. "Hear me out?"

Arms folded and face wearing a mask of skepticism, I nodded warily. "All right."

"Thanks. Look, I'm not talking about joining their guild. But when they get here, they might be able to use an extra hand with training the militia they're going to try to raise. They also might need help filling out a patrol party. I won't ask you to go with me if you don't want to. I just need to be doing something to help instead of feeling helpless."

As I listened, I felt torn. I didn't like being separated from her while we were trapped in this world, but I couldn't really think of any valid reason to ask her not to go out. If anything the training idea at least sounded like it might be fun to watch.

And as I thought it through, I realized one other thing: this all went back to my wife's need to feel in control of her life. As long as we'd known each other, that had been a constant: she'd refused to accept financial help or lodging from my family when we first moved to Japan, and she'd never been comfortable when I was the only one working—in fact, that period where she was unemployed had been the source of more arguments than anything else in our marriage; she hated feeling dependent.

She had to do this. I understood.

I just wished I felt more comfortable with it.

I realized I'd gotten lost in thought when I was jarred back to awareness by a sudden burst of mirth from the front door of the pub: Ducker's loud laughter as he joked with one of the other Black Cats while they entered. My eyes refocused and I saw Camilla sitting across the table from me, watching me intently. For once she didn't make a remark about being off in the land of the Forest Elves; she simply waited in silence while I sorted out my thoughts about what she'd said.

I picked up my half-full cup of tea and sipped at it; it was cold. I stirred it pointlessly as I decided on the words I wanted to use.

"That's fair," I said finally, keeping things simple. I could see her relax the moment the words left my mouth, which gave me courage to go on—but no ideas for doing so. I searched for something else I could honestly say that wouldn't sound lame or contrived, but nothing came to mind.

"I know you're not happy about this, Seiji," she said a little more quietly, reaching across the table and brushing her fingers against mine. "But it's something I need to do."

"No, it's fine," I said quickly, turning over my hand and finding hers before it could slip away. What I said next wasn't entirely truthful, but it wasn't wrong either. "I had a problem with being dragged into what was starting to feel like a war of vengeance. I can't object to anything we can reasonably do to help here. Let's see who the Army sends and what they have to say."

I had a few moments to savor the look of gratitude on my wife's face before the moment was interrupted by a loud whistle. We both looked in the direction of the Black Cats' table quickly enough to see Ducker with his fingers held to his mouth as two of the others yanked him back down to his seat. Looking embarrassed and perhaps on the verge of PKing his guildmate, Keita gave us a wave and beckoned us over. Exchanging a look, Camilla and I grabbed our drinks and migrated over to their table; whatever they had in mind was bound to be better than rehashing our disagreements.

Ducker looked about ready to explode with excitement, and most of the other Black Cats weren't far behind him. Giving us a sheepish grin, Keita beckoned to a pair of empty chairs at the end of the table. "Hey there, you two. Sorry about that—I asked Ducker to get your attention, and he was on his feet before I could finish saying '_discreetly'_."

"No worries," Camilla said cheerfully, her mood seeming to have been greatly improved by our fence-mending compromise. "You wanted to talk to us about something?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," Keita replied with a grin. "You guys ever been on a raid before?"

My wife and I shared a laugh at that. "A few times," she said in wry understatement. "But only… before, in other MMOs. Not in SAO."

"We did have a chance to get into one once, but that was…" I trailed off, recalling the fateful raid that claimed Diabel's life—a raid to which he'd invited us; an invitation which we'd declined. "A missed opportunity," I said finally.

"Maybe it's your lucky day then," Tetsuo put in. "We've been invited to a small raid group some friends of ours are putting together."

"I was getting to that," Keita said, soundly only a little annoyed.

"So get to it!" Tetsuo said, laughing and giving his guild leader a playful shove.

"Well, it's like this," Keita went on, ignoring Tetsuo. "We've got some friends from another guild who are a little lower level than us, and I was telling them about your adventures in Weilan Marsh. Word is that Amphoric territory is supposed to be an overland raid zone, and it leads to that castle you can see from the shore of the northern lake—Weilan Keep, it's called."

"We've never been that far north on this floor," I said, suppressing a grimace at the thought of tales of our "adventures" spreading elsewhere.

Camilla nodded her agreement. "Anything good drop there?" she asked.

"Dunno," Keita replied with a shrug. "It's not really a popular zone; apparently you can only get to Weilan Keep by raiding through the Marsh, and that's supposed to be a lot of work just to reach a small low-level dungeon."

When Keita didn't go on immediately, Tetsuo spoke up again. "We figure since we're high-level for this floor, between us and our three friends we could put together a couple of small raid parties and get through it a lot more easily. If the two of you joined us, we'd totally breeze through it."

"What do you say?" Keita asked. "I think it'll be a good chance to hone our skills. Someday we might make it to the front lines, and we'll need to know how to act in a raid."

I'm not sure why I chose that moment to look over at Sachi. Perhaps it was because by this point, I'd been around the Black Cats at least enough to know what to expect when the group started talking about going adventuring. And sure enough: the more Keita talked about raiding and being on the front lines, the less comfortable Sachi looked.

I glanced to the side, wondering if my wife had noticed that, but when she turned to look at me it was obvious where her mind was. "What do you think, Kadyn?"

"I think," I said, fingering the necklace I still wore, "that I'd rather not find out whether or not Gekkekagh can take back his blessing."

Camilla stuck out her tongue, amused. "Seriously? You're worried about losing the ability to wander aimlessly through a nasty low-level swamp without being attacked by frogmen?"

"No," I said, in complete earnest despite the smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. "I'm worried about losing a necklace that gives me +5 to Agility. That's worth at least a level to me."

There was laughter around the table; I doubted there was anyone present who could fail to sympathize with the desire not to lose a piece of gear with good stats. "Besides," I added. "I think we're going to be pretty busy anyway starting tomorrow."

"Oh!" Camilla said, as if the thought of the conflict hadn't occurred to her. "He's right, I'm sorry, we've got to meet up with the Army tomorrow."

"The Army?" Keita asked. "Ah, right, the bandit prisoners—how did that go?"

"It'll make a funny story for later," I said. "But in the meantime, we should probably give you an idea of what to expect."

Having talked through the whole plan several times from different angles thus far helped the explanation go more smoothly; it didn't take long to clearly outline the basics for the Black Cats. It wasn't an especially complicated plan once you boiled it all down.

"Seriously?" Keita asked, sounding amazed. "The Army is coming here?"

"So to speak," I confirmed. "We don't know how many they're sending or exactly what they plan to do, but the general idea is what I just described: they're going to patrol for bandits, recruit new members, and try to organize a militia."

The Black Cats looked back and forth to one another. No one answered until Tetsuo and Ducker—pretty much at the same time—both exclaimed, "Awesome!" They immediately broke into laughter; Ducker sketched out a lazy salute with a mock-serious expression that even drew a laugh from Sachi.

"Well, that's good news," Keita said. "I'm glad someone's finally doing something about the bandit problem here—I guess we should thank you for that."

"It's too bad you can't join us for the raid," Sasamaru said, one of the group's quieter members speaking up at last.

"Yeah, have fun at boot camp!" Ducker said brightly.

That got me to snickering. Camilla laughed too, but then went on in a slightly more sober tone. "Listen, Keita, don't take any chances with your people in there. You won't be able to detect the Amphorics while they're underwater. You can end up getting ambushed by a whole bunch of them in a hurry, especially if you try to retreat or maneuver and pick up more adds."

Keita nodded. "Thanks, I'll make sure we keep that in mind. With only eight of us, we probably won't get too deep anyway before we have to turn back—we just want to do something different and get some practice being in a raid group."

"And loot," said Ducker.

"Definitely loot," agreed Tetsuo. "Look at Sachi! She can barely restrain herself from single-handedly taking on the whole marsh, she wants their drops so badly."

"Oh, shut up, Tetsuo!" Sachi seemed to have mastered the art of pouting in response to the gentle teasing of her guildmates, but it was an art that still allowed for the occasional smile to creep through.

"Well, anyway," Keita said while waving his chopsticks threateningly at Tetsuo. "I just wanted to extend the invitation. We're leaving early in the morning, so we'll probably be off by the time your Army folks get here. Good luck with that!"

"Thanks," I said, meaning it despite my earlier misgivings. "You guys be safe out there. Weilan Marsh is no joke."

"Hah!" Ducker kicked back his chair, standing and striking a dramatic pose. "Your frogmen haven't had to deal with the Black Cats yet! I'll get Parida to make us a soup with all the meat drops!"

On that high note we bid our goodbyes to the Black Cats and headed back to our inn room, leaving to the sound of their friendly laughter. Camilla and I didn't have much to say to each other on the way, but it didn't feel like the dangerous silence that had come between us earlier in the evening—more like the comfortable kind that settled in when there simply wasn't anything that needed saying.

It was just as well. We'd arrived at a compromise that had more or less settled our earlier argument, but I wasn't a whole lot more comfortable with it than I had been before—and I needed to be if I was going to hold up my end of the compromise, a role which largely consisted of not pitching a fit if Camilla decided to go off hunting bandits with the Army. Perhaps sleeping on it would help me come to terms with the risks and give her the space to do what she needed to do.

It was easy enough to say. Not so easy to do. Because once you set aside my very sincere love for my wife and concern for her safety, there was still an uncomfortable nugget of self-interest buried within my fears of something happening to her.

The fact was, there was only one of us who was capable of surviving without the other in this world—and I was pretty sure it wasn't me.


	11. Boot Camp

The Army arrived in Taft at precisely 7:00 AM.

When the sphere of blue light faded from the warp gate, it left behind Yurielle, Corbatz, and four other players in dark sea-green Army uniforms and heavy plate armor. As soon as they stepped down from the dais, the teleportation effect reappeared and deposited another six of their guildmates where the first group had stood moments before.

Camilla and I both bowed to Yurielle as she approached; she reciprocated, locks of her bangs drawing a silver curtain across her face as she did. Word had spread overnight amongst the residents of Taft about what to expect, and already a number of players had begun gathering around the warp gate at the sight of the heavily-armed groups, a mixture of curiosity and apprehension in the voices that muttered and whispered back and forth.

Following a crisp order from Yurielle, the second Army group that had warped in began marching off towards the woods. Once a large enough crowd had gathered, Yurielle stepped forward and raised her voice. I started slightly in surprise; her normal conversational style had been quiet and restrained when we met, but it took on a strength I hadn't expected from her when she projected in order to be heard by everyone present.

"People of Taft! I am Yurielle, second in command of the clearing guild all of you will know as the Army. We've received reports of a bandit epidemic plaguing this floor. By order of our leader, we intend to take all necessary actions to preserve public order and player safety." I doubted her brief pause then was to allow anyone to raise questions or comments—more likely it was intended to give them a few moments to let her introduction sink in.

"In aid of this, I ask all of you to bring word to everyone you know living or adventuring on this floor, and deliver to them our three promises. First: that Taft and the surrounding area are currently under our protection. The unit I just dispatched will begin patrolling the roads through the Taftwood, and it is one of at least two parties which will be patrolling this floor daily, giving aid to any who require it."

It was no small boast. I looked around at the locals to gauge their reactions, and saw more than a few rays of hope in the expressions of the assembled players. A pair stood out to me as they elbowed each other and grinned.

"Second: that any players who are willing to join us in our fight to maintain order and clear this game will be welcomed into our guild—and will receive access to the same training, equipment and resources available to all other new recruits."

That one got some attention. I wasn't surprised—despite their fall from glory after the 25th floor raid, the Army still commanded an impressive reputation amongst lower-level players, and the prospect of possibly joining that guild and becoming an elite _clearer_ had to appeal to some of the players local to this floor.

But Yurielle wasn't done—there was still one promise to make. "Third: that we will begin organizing and training a volunteer militia that will help the players of this floor reclaim it from the bandits and keep it that way. I'm sure there will be many who want to help rid this floor of criminal players but don't wish to join our guild—this is your opportunity to make a difference."

By this point there was a loud buzz rising and falling within the crowd as dozens of muted conversations quietly overlapped. I tried to pick out anything understandable, but for the most part it was a muddle of apprehension and tentative hope.

Silence stretched on for several seconds after that. I wasn't sure what Yurielle intended or expected from the crowd—applause? Cheers? There was scattered clapping and several players made a point of stepping forward and bowing respectfully, but Taft was a town that had been cowed by the bandit problem for weeks now—most players seemed to be taking a sensible "wait and see" approach to these announcements.

Sensing that no more announcements were forthcoming, the crowd started to disperse. Several players approached Yurielle and asked for more information about joining her guild; Camilla and I waited until she'd sent them back to the first floor before broaching the topic of finding some way for my wife to contribute.

"It's not out of the question," Yurielle said, visibly mulling over the idea. "We partner up with others all the time when we're clearing floor bosses." Then her face fell a little. "At least, we did. Yes, we'd be happy to have either of you along to help—you brought us word of the problem, after all."

"I'll mostly be sitting that part out," I explained. "Camilla and I are a great team when it comes to PvM combat, but my character build isn't all that suited for PvP. I did have an idea, though." Yurielle gestured for me to go on. "When we captured that first group of bandits, Camilla had the great thought of signaling for help with this cheap little whistle she bought from the NPC instrument vendor. If you have the funds in your guild treasury, it might not be a bad idea to distribute whistles to the groups and solo players adventuring on this floor—tell them that if the Army hears that whistle, they'll know it means a bandit attack."

I caught Camilla giving me an astonished look out of the corner of my eye. While Yurielle closed her eyes and hummed thoughtfully, I turned slightly and winked, drawing a smile from my wife.

"We'd be happy to chip in and help fund them," she added after a moment, looking at me significantly and getting a nod in response.

Yurielle opened her eyes and looked between the two of us. "I think it's an excellent idea. I'll send a message to Thinker while I'm here and see what he has to say." She smiled. "Are you sure you two wouldn't reconsider signing up with the other recruits? I _know_ he'd say yes to that in a moment; he loved your idea of raising a militia here and training players to help themselves. You like to help people, and that's all he's ever wanted."

When we both shook our heads, she inclined hers. "Very well. We're grateful for any help you can offer."

* * *

The "Army" may have only been a nickname for a guild that was technically still named MTD, but they ran their guild like one, getting an early start to things. Yurielle told Camilla to set her wakeup alarm for 5:45 the next morning, and I caught myself grinning under the bedsheets as my wife—not the most gracious of souls at that kind of hour or when first awoken—grumped her way downstairs in search of breakfast, trailing pungent opinions about exactly what players the Army expected to be out at that hour. I got a message a little while later telling me that they were off to patrol the Taftwood and hunt for the bandit lair there.

_Going to be a full day, _she wrote. _We're going to stop for lunch at some town called Riegess, cross the Glimmerbrook, and circle around to the bridge at the base of the Foothills before returning sometime this afternoon. At least, that's the plan—you know how that goes. You might want to find a library. Love you!_

In other words, I was in for a day of excruciating boredom. I fired off a quick reply wishing her luck, but when I realized I wasn't going to be getting back to sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and decided to make the best of this idle time by exploring Taft.

That wasn't saying much. Despite being the largest settlement on the 11th floor, Taft was tiny by the standards I was used to in Chiba—like most of the towns in Aincrad, the word "town" was being generous. At most there were maybe a thousand residents in total, the majority of them NPCs. Despite that, I knew there had to be quests in the city we hadn't found yet, so if nothing else it was worth looking.

Unfortunately the only quests I came across were hunting quests—that is, go and kill _X_ number of mobs of a specific type. Sometimes just killing them was enough to update your quest log; for others you had to bring back an item as proof, usually something that didn't drop every time. I wasn't going to be clearing those quests by myself, so I set them aside and made a note to bring Camilla to the quest givers once she got back so that we could do them together.

But when my wife finally returned that afternoon, she looked worn down and was in no mood to go picking up quests. "Save those," she said as she waved goodbye to Yurielle's group. "I've been on my feet all day, and right now I just want to go sit down somewhere and not get up for a while."

"You wanted to do this," I observed, carefully keeping my tone neutral as we headed towards the inn where we were staying. "So how did it go?"

"Boring as hell," Camilla replied wearily. "Which I suppose is good, I guess—it means either they're keeping their heads down, or we're looking in the wrong place." It was hard to escape the impression that she was actually _disappointed_ they hadn't found any bandits to fight.

"I wish I'd asked Viyami where the bandit camp was when I had the chance," I said, still annoyed at myself for not thinking of it at the time. "She might've actually told me. Next time she shows up I'll make sure to ask."

"_If_ she shows up."

"_If_ she shows up," I echoed in affirmation, stopping briefly in front of our room before going inside. "Which is not out of the question."

"Mm." Her reply was a sound I knew very well: a noncommittal hum that could be interpreted just about any way; usually it meant she didn't agree but didn't think it was worth disputing. "What about you? Have you managed to seduce all of the cute NPCs in town yet?"

I snorted loudly and gave her a look. If it hadn't been an absurd question because of how uncharacteristic that would've been for me, it would've still been absurd because you couldn't seduce an NPC. At least, I _assumed_ you couldn't—I hadn't attempted it, but I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that at least one person had.

"Come on," Camilla said, grinning and looking back over her shoulder as she tinkered with her equipment menu, selecting a set of town clothing. "Don't tell me you didn't see that milkmaid that's always pathing between the stables and her house. I bet she's got a quest for you."

I laughed, and then turned it into a cough as I looked away from her and made an obvious effort of trying to compose myself. "You got me," I admitted playfully. "I soloed that one. You should've seen what she dropped."

I staggered as something warm, soft and implacable collided with me and a pair of arms looped themselves around the back of my neck. "If the answer involves a clothing item," Camilla whispered in my ear with a laugh, "you're in a world of trouble. Come on; let's go find a booth at the pub so I can sit down, put my feet up, and get some food in me."

I pretended grievous injury, slipping out of her grasp and going to open the door for her. "You need to watch it with those tackles," I said, mostly in jest. "I don't think you understand yet how much stronger you are in this world—your STR parameter makes you hit like a stack of cinder blocks."

"I'll try not to take that as a crack on my weight," Camilla said with a smirk as she walked out.

As she told it over dinner, the next day at least promised to be a little more entertaining: Yurielle had brought a few senior members from the Army to conduct militia training exercises, and seemed to have a list of volunteers who wanted to sign up. True to her word, Yurielle was going to have Camilla give shielding lessons to anyone who wanted to learn; the primary weapons used by most of the Army members we'd seen so far had been two-handed weapons and polearms, and they didn't seem to have a shield trainer.

For this show, I was willing to set my alarm like I was expected at the office. The shield training wasn't scheduled until later that morning, but Yurielle apparently wanted to meet early in order to go over the list of volunteers and plan the day's agenda.

The meeting ended up being held in the town square after breakfast. It was easily the biggest open space within the town's Safe Zone, a large rectangular area paved with a mosaic of muted earth tones using what looked like flattened and polished stones from the Foothills. A party had already been dispatched to patrol that area earlier in the morning; aside from Yurielle we saw three other Army members waiting in the square when we arrived.

"There they are," said one of them as he gestured towards us, a handsome man of perhaps 30 with close-cut black hair. "Shall we wait for the Lieutenant, ma'am?"

"He knew what time we were meeting," Yurielle said with a hint of annoyance and a glance at where I assumed her clock was pinned in her HUD. "We'll start by reviewing Camilla's shield trainees and discussing how we want to handle them."

Pale, slender fingers tapped at the air, manifesting her notes as a small book which she thumbed through. "We've got four on the list for shields. One is a new recruit, so we'll want to make sure he's selected a one-handed weapon and outfitted with the guild's starting gear. The other three are locals, one guilded and the other two not. We'll want to check over their equipment before the training and make sure it's not going to break if it takes a strong hit."

"Sounds good," Camilla said, nodding. "Do you have any idea what their levels or previous shield training are like? Am I starting with complete noobs here?"

One of the other officers snickered as Yurielle smiled thinly. "I seem to recall the youngest one sounded like he knew what he was doing, although I don't really know why he chose to use a mace. The others—"

Camilla interrupted there. "A mace? Was his name Tetsuo, by any chance?"

Yurielle glanced down at her book. "That's right," she said with surprise. "Friend of yours?"

"Of us both," I said. "He's part of a local guild called Black Cats of the Moonlit Night. Good kids. They live on this floor and they've got a lot of heart—I'd bet that if Tetsuo's volunteered, they all have."

"Oh, that poor boy." My wife rested a hand on my shoulder and put on an air of greatly exaggerated pity. "He has _no_ idea what he's in for."

"Be gentle," I cautioned her.

She dropped her hand and looked at me as if I'd started speaking Sumerian.

"Relatively," I clarified, conceding the implicit point.

Yurielle cleared her throat, bringing our little sidebar interruption to an end. "Alright then. Obviously this part is your show—we're not going to tell you how to teach your skill. I will say that the end goal here is to have these people be able to take responsibility for patrolling their own floor and protecting their own players. However you think that's best done, we'll trust your judgment. I just need to be clear that we're also trusting you to represent the Army well here—the way you handle this reflects upon us all."

"I understand," Camilla said, bowing deeply at the waist. "You don't need to worry about—"

"It's about time, Lieutenant," Yurielle interrupted suddenly, her eyes narrowing to ice-blue slivers as she turned to address someone behind us. "I wasn't aware that Taft was that easy to get lost in."

"Sorry about that," said a disturbingly familiar voice that caused my wife to jerk upright from her bow, half-whirling around as she looked in the direction of the comment.

"Oh, please tell me you're joking," she said with a palm sliding across her face, her look of disgust and disbelief a match for the expression on Kibaou's face when he noticed her. She was looking at him like he was something unpleasant with too many legs that had crawled out from under a rock; his stare had the injured quality of someone regarding their current situation as a personal affront.

Looking back and forth between Camilla and a very confused Yurielle, Kibaou finally seemed to find his voice again. "Is this my punishment for being late?"

"Lieutenant Kibaou," Yurielle said evenly, arms crossing in front of her. "If you think you merit some kind of punishment, I'm sure it can be arranged. In the meantime I'd be most grateful if you'd explain why you're reacting in this way to our guest trainer."

"Guest… trainer?" Kibaou's expression, if possible, became even more incredulous as he took in that new information and looked at me as if noticing for the first time that I was there. "I… you're serious? These are the players who told you there was a bandit problem here?"

When Yurielle nodded, Kibaou barked out a short laugh. "Oh, now that just tears it. These two frauds? They're having you on to puff themselves up."

"_Lieutenant_." Yurielle had seemed so nice and sweet back in Thinker's office, and I hadn't seen her raise her voice yet other than when she was giving her intro speech the other day. When she spoke now, as quietly as before but with a sharp edge to her voice, I resolved immediately _never_ to piss her off if I could help it. "I'm sure this is quite funny to you, but I am losing patience. You will explain yourself now, and I would take it as a kindness if you'd keep the editorial comments to a minimum."

Looking over at Camilla, I could tell from her expression that she wanted to claw out Kibaou's eyes and serve them in a _gunkan_ roll. I had to admire her restraint in letting Kibaou answer without interrupting with an editorial comment of her own.

"I remember these two from when the game first started," Kibaou explained, looking at Camilla through slitted eyes. "_Someone_ started a rumor that they'd killed a PKer, and they took advantage of it even though it wasn't true to make themselves look good."

"Go on, Kibaou," Camilla prompted with acidic sweetness. "Tell her the rest. Tell her _how_ you knew that the rumors weren't true. And while you're at it, try telling the _truth_ about how we handled it."

Kibaou's audacious bullshit was blatant enough to get me to butt in. "You've got some serious nerve, accusing _us_ of being frauds after you got completely clowned by a 13-year-old kid and wrongly accused us based on _his_ lies. Was that little screwup of yours not humiliating enough?"

"Oh, what?" Kibaou sneered at me as Yurielle kept looking between the three of us, mouth half-open. His look was a direct challenge and a refusal to engage anything I'd said. "You too? The lady can't defend herself?"

"The lady can defend herself just fine, Kibaou," Camilla retorted as she pulled her hair back into a tight tail and tucked it into the collar of her armor. "If you need me to demonstrate, we can make that happen—right here and now is just fine with me."

A sharp _crack_ split the air in a searing flash of blue light, the sound as intense as if it was right in my ear. Startled, all three of us took a step back as Yurielle slowly gathered up the still-glowing coils of a whip and returned it to her hip opposite her rapier. "I trust I have your attention now?" she asked.

Seeing three rapid nods, Yurielle re-folded her arms and looked between the three of us, her disappointment and annoyance palpable. "I'm of half a mind to send Kibaou back to the first floor right now and tell the both of you to go spend the day doing something else. But it so happens that we have people we've promised to help here today. I intend to see that succeed." One at a time, she gave each of us a piercing look. "If you have issues you need to sort out between yourselves, you need to settle them now or go find another way to be useful."

"She challenged me," Kibaou said, pointing at Camilla. "Am I allowed to answer that?"

Yurielle wore a long-suffering look on her face. I couldn't tell how much of that was from Kibaou's winning personality and how much was directed at us for being part of the problem. "Perhaps that would be best," she said finally. "If crossing swords will put this to rest, then get it over with. But let this be the end of it."

At that moment it was very disturbing just how much Kibaou and my wife seemed to have in common: the reaction from both of them was nothing less than enthusiasm. "It would be my absolute pleasure," she declared flatly as she opened her menu and equipped the rest of her gear. "I don't know how Osaka-chan here managed to get any kind of authority in your guild, but every time we've crossed paths with him he's done nothing but grief us."

"I hear lots of talk, babe," Kibaou said as he slowly withdrew the large sword from his back and made his way to the open part of the square. He didn't make any move to equip the enclosed helm that was popular in the Army; privately I wondered whether it would even fit over the spiky cactus-like hairdo he sported. He grinned at her, leveling his sword as he gripped it with both hands and held it before him. "Speaking of which, you still faking that funny accent?"

Camilla didn't rise to the bait as she strode purposefully out to meet him in the open yard, drawing her best sword from the scabbard with a slithering scrape of metal. My eyes narrowed at that; if she was ignoring a crack on her accent, she was taking this deadly seriously—in a way that should have scared the wits out of Kibaou, assuming he had any. Which at this point I did not assume.

I sat down on one of the benches lining the outer edges of the yard, catching my wife's gaze briefly and nodding to her in a silent _ganbatte_. This one was completely out of my hands.

Standing thirty meters apart on opposite ends of the square, both of them manipulated their menus in what I assumed had to be an exchange of duel requests. A large, flat graphic appeared twenty meters in the air at a point exactly between the two of them, declaring for all to see that a duel was about to commence between Camilla and Kibaou. A stir rose amongst the small handful of players in the area, and several shouts of "duel!" echoed down the alleyways.

The number _60 _appeared in the center of that hanging display, and began counting down the seconds with a series of insect-like buzzes.


	12. PvP

Facing each other across thirty meters of paved stone tiles, Kibaou and Camilla waited for the duel countdown to finish, the chime of each number playing against a metronome of chittering tenth-seconds. It left me plenty of time to wonder exactly why Kayaba had decided that dueling players needed a full minute's delay to prepare. Was it to give them time for second thoughts? For last-minute equipment changes? To say last goodbyes? Or just to do what I was doing and wonder why he'd given them so much time? It seemed excessive, from the perspective of someone sitting on the sidelines and watching the timer tick away with excruciating slowness.

Kibaou held his bastard sword out in front of him in a two-handed grip, the broad, thick blade jutting up and just slightly forward. Like Camilla's one-handed long sword, it was an efficient-looking, no-nonsense kind of weapon—none of the fancy adornments or engravings that so many players liked to put on their swords, and very likely a mob drop from somewhere on a higher floor. That brought on a sudden, distressing line of thought: just how high a level was Kibaou? Granted, they'd lost most of their best players in the 25th floor boss raid, but in order to be a "senior" member of the Army and hold some kind of rank, he had to be competent in ways that weren't obvious from the jackassery he usually put on display with us. And we weren't front-liners by a long shot.

_This could be a very short fight_, I thought uncomfortably as the timer reached zero and a louder buzz sounded out across the suddenly hushed scene.

With a roar, Kibaou launched himself forward, raising his sword high above his head as it began to glow bright yellow. At the same moment Camilla kicked off, carrying herself forward in several quick strides before tucking her shoulder low. A bluish glow enveloped her shield, and she shot rapidly forward in a move that I knew very well by now.

But Kibaou had long ago seen the way she liked to use her shield, and while her skills had come a long way, he was ready for it. He sidestepped quickly while his sword descended in a diagonal arc, causing an explosion of purple light and the brief system message _Immortal Object_ as it struck the ground just after she passed. Having both missed, they spun to face each other.

This time Camilla recovered first, her red ponytail yanking free of her armor and whipping around her head as she dug in a heel to change direction quickly. While Kibaou was still bringing his sword back up, hers was descending in an overhand slash that could've split his head in half back in the real world.

Dancing backwards just in time, Kibaou turned the movement into a one-handed uppercut technique that deflected her strike in a streak of red tracers and sent her staggering back, off-balance. She just barely got her shield up and across her chest in time to absorb a four-hit combo that erupted against her shield in orange sparks.

I could sense a crowd gathering around the square—a duel would always draw attention, but as word spread that someone from the Army was dueling, more and more players showed up on the sidelines, chatting excitedly and placing bets. They were the only ones talking; the two combatants themselves were absolutely focused on each other. There were no witty insults now, no interjections of ego or intimidation—just the rapid-fire exchange of skills that slowly shaved off slivers of each other's HP bars as blocking damage soaked through.

Camilla should've had the edge in that fight with her superior defense, but Kibaou seemed to have a slight edge in speed, and every time his blade was met by her sword or shield, a little more of her HP chipped away. It wasn't enough to trigger what the system considered a _clean hit_ that would end the duel, but he and his weapon were still strong enough to gradually whittle her down, her gauge dropping just below 70% as she narrowly deflected a sword skill off her blade at an angle. If this came down to a war of attrition, it was a war she wouldn't win.

In a follow-up, Camilla's sword whistled through the air where Kibaou's head had been a moment prior. But as soon as he recovered from his technique's brief cooldown, he dove to the ground and came rolling back up to his feet, leaping backwards several times as she pressed the attack. On the last strike he jerked his head back as the tip of Camilla's blade came so close to his nose that I couldn't see whether it had hit or not. Then his own blade glowed bright red with the aura of a building sword skill, and he gripped the bastard sword with both hands as the technique exploded into a rising spiral of crimson light.

Eyes widening, Camilla twisted her body and got most of the shield up in front of her in time. The powerful two-handed attack battered her defense with several blows, a noticeable fraction of her HP gauge depleting from blocking damage as she went flying backwards for several meters and bounced across the ground.

I shot to my feet with a yell, looking for movement from her and focusing closely on her HP bar. It was still green and the duel hadn't ended, so however impressive that blow looked, she must've blocked just enough of it to stay in the fight. Kibaou—seeming to sense victory as she staggered back to her feet—sprinted across the space between them, his sword trailing sparks as the tip dragged along the stone tiles and built up energy for a massive finishing attack.

As Kibaou drew within striking distance of Camilla, he bellowed out a loud and sustained _kiai_, swinging his sword in a mighty crosscut that would've bisected her in mid-torso. She dropped to one knee, ducking under the swing and letting it slide off the flat of her sword blade as it slanted down and to her right across her shoulder. Once he'd fully extended himself and was locked into the recovery frame of his sword skill, she kicked off the ground and swung her shield arm up with all of her strength. The edge of her shield took Kibaou under the chin, lifting him off his feet and shutting his mouth with force that against a flesh-and-blood person would've shattered teeth, if not every bone in his skull.

That didn't end the duel, but it gave her a critical opening as the sword went flying out of Kibaou's hand. Stunned, he seemed to hang there in the air for one breathless moment that felt like it was frozen in time, as if the game had lagged. Then the rim of Camilla's shield flared up with the blue light of a shield technique, and she struck him at point-blank range with the charge attack that was intended to rapidly close at least five or ten meters of distance. All of that force and system-assisted velocity concentrated itself on the point of impact just under his solar plexus, and Kibaou flailed gracelessly through the air before hitting one of the benches and flipping over the back of it.

I didn't need to hear the victory chime or look up at the announcement message to know that hit had had been the end of it. A loud cheer broke out in the crowd—cynically, I thought to myself that they would've cheered all the same no matter who had won; they'd come expecting entertainment, and they'd gotten it. Now that the duel was finished I jogged out into the square to join and congratulate my wife, who was walking over to where Kibaou was still struggling to push himself up onto his elbows. Seeing several pairs of boots approaching him, he rolled over and looked up to see Camilla—her sword sheathed, hand offered. Still a bit shell-shocked, he eyed her suspiciously.

"_Omee aho chau ka?_" she said with an exasperated tone, still holding out her hand. "Get over yourself. If I really wanted to rub it in, I'd go ask if anyone had a recording crystal running."

Slowly, warily, he reached up and grabbed her hand. She pulled him up to his feet and let go, crossing her arms under the curve of her breastplate. "Look, Kibaou," she said. "I don't fucking love you. And I don't have to—I just have to deal with the fact that you're here without losing my shit. Since we've both got a job to do, how about you do me the same courtesy for once?"

Rubbing at the underside of his jaw, Kibaou continued glaring at Camilla as if that was his default idle animation. Then his mouth twisted into what I had to assume passed for a grin from him. "Alright. You got stones, lady, and you can fight—I'll give you that much."

I glanced to one side as Yurielle and the other three Army officers approached. "That was well-fought on both your parts," she said, giving Kibaou a significant glance. "I trust there'll be no more outbursts from you, Lieutenant?"

"Yeah, but I call shenanigans," he said without any real heat as he stretched his neck to one side and then the other. "She hits with her shield."

"It did not escape my notice," Yurielle said dryly, a glimmer of amusement in her blue eyes as one delicate silver eyebrow arched. "Perhaps you should ask her for lessons."

Despite trying to keep a straight face, I let out a loud snicker. Kibaou sputtered, but whatever words he wanted to use died in his throat at the look his commander gave him. Camilla took the opportunity to bow out in order to go get her equipment repaired, and we walked together to the NPC smith a few streets over.

"Think that'll settle it?" she asked on the way, looking considerably more cheerful.

"Not likely," I replied without really having to think about it. "Kibaou is an S-rank asshole. He'll probably ease off for a while, especially if he doesn't want to get kicked out of the Army. But I'd watch your back all the same."

"That's about what I figured," she agreed. "For now, though, at least we can hope we won't have to listen to any more of his crap."

When we returned, it seemed like there wouldn't be any opportunity to put that to the test anyway. Camilla, Kibaou and two of the other officers were each given a separate quarter of the town square—from the looks of it, each one would be teaching different styles. The last officer—we hadn't been introduced to any of them formally yet—had a collection of documents spread out in front of him, and was bent over them as he conferred with Yurielle. A line of players queued up in front of them, with Yurielle checking each name off of a list and sending most of them over to one trainer or another. I caught a glimpse of the Black Cats in the line and couldn't suppress a grin; they stood out if for no reason other than being the only group that was (mostly) laughing and joking around. Just about everyone else seemed—appropriately enough, I supposed—very somber and serious. It was like attending a funeral, but with more weapons and less incense.

Camilla did nothing to lift this mood as her four trainees presented themselves. Aside from Tetsuo, there were three other players: two were wearing mid-level equipment aside from their shields, which were mediocre; the third was clad in the uniform and heavy armor that identified him as an Army recruit and moved as if he was new to it.

"Today," she began, pacing slowly back and forth in front of them, "I'm going to teach the four of you how to use a shield in combat against another player. Before we start, I want to ask you a few questions. Who here has fought another player before—in a duel or otherwise?"

Two hands shot up: the new recruit and one of the other locals, a young man in his late teens with long tannish-brown hair. She pointed to each in turn. "Keep your hands up if you've fought another player _outside_ of a duel."

Both hands dropped; she nodded. "That's what I thought. So let's get this out of the way first: forget most of what you know about fighting against mobs. Anyone with the STR stat to wield a shield at all can hide behind it while a computer-controlled opponent stands there and throws attacks at you. What I'm going to be teaching you is how to deal with _human_ opponents—in other words, bandits and PKers. Because in case it wasn't obvious from your own experiences or that duel you saw earlier: humans won't just stand there. They move, they think, and they are as desperate to survive and win as you are. Maybe more."

There was a chorus of nods, punctuated by a single raised hand. Camilla pointed at its owner, one of the other locals who identified himself as Kyoja. "Are we gonna need an open skill slot for this? I don't have one and I'm not sure when I'll get another."

Camilla shook her head. "You don't need a skill equipped to use a shield—if you've got the STR, you can pick one up and block stuff with it—but with higher skill levels you take less damage from blocking attacks. You also need to level up the skill in order to unlock child skills like Defender or—depending on how you use your shield—Bash or Charge."

Then she turned and singled out Tetsuo, who grinned until he heard what she had to say. "You're especially going to need this because of your mace—it's not a defensive weapon and it's harder to redirect attacks than it is using a sword. If you don't have the skill for your shield equipped yet, make it a priority."

After that she divided the trainees up into rotating pairs, having them execute and block basic sword skills and watching in order to see how they moved and reacted. We'd actually talked this over at length the night before, with her using me as a sounding board—given my total lack of experience using a shield in this game—in order to get an idea of what she'd need to teach and how she should approach it. She'd really gotten into it, all the way down to making one of her checklists for the entire curriculum. It was nice seeing her get so much enjoyment out of the project, and it had given us something to do together.

And I had to admit, it also beat the hell having her out on patrol all day. Though to hear her tell it, there would be plenty more of that as well.

When this pair sparring started getting repetitive and boring, I looked around at the other training groups to see what everyone else was up to. Kibaou was teaching sword footwork and had by far the largest crowd, including Ducker of all people—who seemed to be doing his best to take the whole thing seriously. At least, that was the impression I had until Kibaou sharply corrected him on his short sword form, which resulted in Ducker making faces behind Kibaou's back and then promptly freezing his expression into stone-cold seriousness every time his trainer looked his way.

Sasamaru was with the polearms class. I supposed that made sense, given that he used a spear; they weren't all that much different. I half-expected to see Keita there too, but he was huddled around Yurielle and her sub-commander with a much smaller group of players which Camilla had explained were going to be trained as patrol leaders.

That left one of the Black Cats unaccounted for—which, given a moment's thought, was not at all surprising. I would've been far more surprised if Sachi _had_ been part of these classes, and it didn't take long for me to locate her on the sidelines, sitting quietly on a bench by herself and watching her guildmates.

I glanced back over at my wife's class. Camilla was running through most of the sword techniques one by one, showing how they looked and sounded like when an opponent was preparing to execute them and how to identify them and anticipate where the system assist would direct the attack. Before I really thought about what I was doing or why, I'd gotten up and circled around the plaza to where Sachi was sitting.

"This seat taken?" It probably wasn't the most creative opening line in the world, but I wasn't trying for originality. The girl looked up at me, a startled-doe look in her eyes for just a moment before she recognized me.

"Kadyn. No, sit down if you want."

That wasn't enthusiasm, but it was probably as good as I was going to get. I settled myself on the bench—they weren't really much more than raised stone slabs, but they served—and loosely clasped my hands with my elbows resting on my knees as I watched Sasamaru alternate attacking and parrying with his sparring partner.

"At least they asked me whether or not I wanted to join," she said after a moment.

I'd wondered, but hadn't yet figured out how to ask. But since she put the subject on the table, it made it feel less like prying. "Not really your thing, I'm guessing?"

"My thing?" Sachi's laugh then was full of far more bitterness than anyone her age ought to have a reason to feel. "No. Not my thing. But then, neither is this whole world."

"I don't think anyone's exactly thrilled to be stuck in SAO," I said, not quite sure how to react or what I ought to say.

Sachi shook her head slowly, her dark hair swaying with the motion. "That's not true. Look at them out there." She didn't point, but made a lazy gesture that encompassed the whole scene. "What do you see?"

I took a good look, panning around and trying to see it through her eyes. "I see a bunch of people sparring. Training. They look like they're having a good time."

I could feel Sachi's gaze on me, and turned to meet it. "Wrong answer?" I asked.

"You're not wrong. But why are they training?"

"Because we've got a bandit problem and they're volunteering to patrol the floor and help protect other players?"

Sachi nodded, a wan smile spreading across her lips. "You're almost there."

I hated guessing games—doubly so when they involved trying to divine what went on in the female mind. "So tell me what you see, then."

She turned and watched the sparring and training for a few moments, the smile disappearing as quickly as it appeared. Her voice was so quiet that I almost didn't hear what she said next over the clash of weapons and the raised voices of the trainers. "I see a bunch of people being trained to kill other people."

Tumblers fell into place. All at once, Sachi's state of mind made perfect sense to me—as did her absolute reluctance to join and her inability to take any pleasure in it. "Yeah, I see what you mean. I'm sorry."

That drew her smile back out, faint but real. "Why are you apologizing? My weakness isn't your fault."

I looked at her sharply and answered her question with one of my own. "You think not wanting to hurt people is weakness?"

Her blue-green eyes held mine for a moment before averting to the ground. "It is in this world. When we went out and helped you the other day, I was so terrified I couldn't do anything but stand there and hold my spear. If one of those bandits had come at me, I don't know if I could've even defended myself."

Before I could respond, a brilliant flash of purple accompanied a loud bang as a critical hit struck someone in Kibaou's class. The receiving player tumbled across the yard head over heels until they skidded to a groaning stop a few meters away from where Sachi and I sat. Nobody was actually dueling, so there was no reduction in hit points, but I was willing to bet he'd be feeling that impact for a while.

Neither of us commented on the incident. We just looked at each other, as if the fact that it happened spoke for itself. After the player had stumbled his way back into line, I asked another question. "Do you know why I'm not out there with my wife?"

"Because you don't know how to use a shield?" The fact that Sachi was capable of making a joke—even teasing a little—was heartening. It was the first time I'd heard anything like it from her, and it caught me so off-guard that I laughed more than the joke was worth.

"I meant why I'm not helping with the bandit problem. Going out on patrol with her. Training for it in general."

When she shook her head, I explained. "I'm a little like you in a way. I really don't like the idea of fighting with other players, and unlike my wife I'm not particularly good at it." I drew my dagger and made it dance across my fingers, a useless skill I'd been practicing and getting better at as my AGI stat increased. "And even if I wanted to be, daggers are shit for defense. Every time I've gotten into a PvP fight in this game, I've come far closer to dying than I like to admit."

Sachi shuddered. "You're different though—I saw you fight. I don't know how you deal with it." A pause, and then: "Sometimes I wish I'd never left the Starting City."

I was quiet for a minute. Absently I rolled the dagger end over end once more and dropped it back into the sheath at my side. "It helps to have someone strong to lean on," I admitted at last. "Sometimes I get to be that for her. Most of the time it's the other way around, but we're not really keeping score. The important thing is that we're there for each other when we need it, and even awful tragedies like being stuck in SAO are a lot more bearable when you have someone to bear it with you."

Sachi's head was slightly bowed, so I couldn't see her face through the veil of her bangs. But just from tone and body language alone, I would've bet anything that she was on the verge of crying. "I wish I had someone like that," she said quietly.

"Don't you?" I asked, brows arching in surprise. "In a way, I envy you a bit—you have a guild with four close friends who support and protect you. I love my wife and there's no one else I'd rather have by my side in this world, but it's just the two of us—we're not front-liners and there's only so much we can do."

"It's not the same," she insisted. "I love my friends too, and I know they care about me, but having them out here with me doesn't make me any less scared of dying—especially not when they keep hinting that I should retrain with sword and shield."

"That's a bad idea," I said bluntly in lieu of far more expressive language. "Why?"

"Because we need an off-tank," she said, hands tightening into white-knuckled fists around the material of her skirt. "And Sasamaru is much better with the spear than I am. It's gotten worse since Keita met your wife—now he's convinced I could do it, if only I could get over being a scaredy-cat." It was a weak joke and it merited only the weak smile she gave it.

I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't think she was blaming us for the pressure she was getting; the idea had obviously been planted well before we crossed their paths. But it was hard to avoid feeling somewhat guilty nonetheless.

"Do you want me to talk to Keita after this?" I asked. "Or have Camilla do so? Maybe we could get some of the pressure off you."

"No!" Sachi said quickly, grabbing my arm and giving me a pleading look. "Please don't. I don't want to make them angry or hurt them by dragging someone else into this."

I patted her hand reassuringly. "Okay, okay. I won't butt in. Just let me know if you change your mind."

When she wanted to use it, Sachi had a beautiful smile. Seeing that smile on her face now, I had the random thought that whenever she managed to get out of this game and reach adulthood, she was going to be a real heartbreaker. She rose from the bench and smoothed out the skirt of her tunic where she'd unconsciously gathered it into fistfuls. "Thanks, Kadyn. I think I'm going to go back to my inn room for a while—I can't watch this anymore."

Nodding in silent acknowledgment, I watched her go until she disappeared into the crowd, then went back to watching a few dozen players practice how to kill each other. It was difficult now to see it in any other light.


	13. Graduation

By the end of the week, I was out of my mind with boredom. At that point the training had spanned four days, during which time the Army had their lower-level members doing two shifts of patrols during daylight hours. There had been no further bandit encounters, which everyone seemed to take as a validation of the Army's presence here—a presence to which the player population was gradually warming.

Yurielle and the training groups remained back in the city, gradually ramping up the difficulty and complexity of the subject matter with drills and lessons until Friday rolled around. That morning there were no lessons, no dividing the town square into quadrants. Instead, Yurielle called everyone together to discuss the agenda for the day.

"You've all done exceptionally well so far. Some of you who started without a weapon skill have progressed remarkably and can probably already tell how much your skills have improved. Today we're going to put what you've learned to the test."

The premise was straightforward enough. Fourteen militia trainees remained out of the nearly twenty-five that had started, and these would be divided into three groups: two of five, and one four-person group with a fifth slot filled in by a recent Army recruit. Each of these groups would take turns facing the other in a group melee. As with all the training so far, there would be no dueling and thus no risk of HP loss—damage dealt by attacks in a Safe Zone were converted by the system into a knockback effect of proportional intensity.

Other than that, there was only one rule: stay inside the checkerboard pattern of dark and light brown tiles that defined the rectangle of the area where Camilla and Kibaou had dueled. If you yielded or got knocked out of the "ring", you were "captured" and out of the match.

Since they had applied as a guild in the first place, Yurielle grouped the Black Cats (minus Sachi) together as the four-person group and called out a new recruit from one of the patrol parties to be the fifth man. They were assigned to fight the victor of the first battle, and in the meantime went to find seats on the sidelines. The instructors weren't taking part in the melee, but they were all gathered over by Yurielle so that they could confer during the fights. Since I wasn't part of that discussion, I decided to head over and socialize with to the Black Cats while we watched.

"Hey Kadyn," said Keita cheerfully as I approached and looked for a place to sit. "Tetsuo would like you to know that your wife is bent on his destruction."

"That's not what I said," Tetsuo complained as he melodramatically rubbed his left arm. "I just said that after being in her class for four days I can tell she's trying to have me killed. I'm like the butt monkey of the training group."

Sasamaru leaned forward and patted Ducker's head patronizingly, grinning as he dodged a swipe in return. "Nah, Ducker here has that angle well-covered."

"Where's Sachi?" I asked before the great butt monkey debate could escalate. Then I answered my own question. "She didn't want to come?"

Keita shook his head, frowning. "She's been kinda quiet ever since this whole bandit thing started. Well, quiet_er_, anyway. I told her we were only doing it twice a week, and that we'd stop once the bandits were gone, but she still doesn't want anything to do with it."

"I can't really blame her," I said, able to say that in complete sincerity without violating her trust. I'd been nothing but truthful when I told her that I saw a bit of myself in her, albeit taken to the kind of extreme you'd get if you stripped away whatever courage I possessed. It made me wonder just how much differently she and I would've really ended up if I'd been stuck in SAO without Rebecca.

Keita, for his part, seemed surprised to hear this from me. "Well, it sucks, sure, but it's kinda gotta be done, doesn't it? I appreciate what the Army's trying to do here—what the two of you are trying to do here. I wish more of the front-liners were like that; they don't seem to care what goes on down here in the lower floors."

"We're not front-liners, though," I said.

"Why's that? You should be."

I had to stop and really think over my answer to that. I barely noticed the two teams filing out onto the dueling area. "It's a long story. You know some of it already. What it comes down to is that some bad things happened and we got left behind more or less by choice. We could probably catch up eventually if we did some serious grinding, but we don't really like being in parties."

Keita opened his mouth to reply, but whatever he started to say was drowned out by a cheer from everyone who was actually paying attention. I looked up just as a whistle sounded loudly and the first melee began.

You could tell immediately who'd been paying attention during Thursday's lessons on small unit combat. The group that I decided to call Team A immediately fell into a loose chevron formation, with the group's tank at the point and a pair of players behind and to either side guarding his flanks and backing each other up. The tank's left flank was guarded by a local Army recruit with a poleaxe and a rapier-user, while on his right was a swordsman in heavy armor and a _very_ young-looking blonde girl with a two-handed warhammer that looked improbably large for her.

Team B, by contrast, _had_ no formation. They had a very similar mix of weapons to the first group, albeit with another two-handed sword rather than a warhammer and a second sword-and-shield user instead of the fencer on Team A's left flank. But the players were distributed in a rough skirmish line—and calling it that was giving them the benefit of the doubt that their arrangement was intentional.

When the two groups charged at each other, the first to meet were the main tanks of the two groups—both with a one-handed sword and shield. They seemed evenly matched as they lit up each other's shields with the sword skills they unleashed, neither doing decisive damage; both had done a good job absorbing Camilla's shield lessons. One of B's two-handed swordsmen charged in to try to double-team A's tank, but was intercepted by the Army recruit swinging his poleaxe in a wide arc, forcing the swordsman to leap back out of the way.

A bright flash of purple diverted my gaze, and I looked over just in time to see the young girl drive a powerful two-handed swing from her warhammer into the midriff of Team B's other swordsman, who'd clearly underestimated both her skill and her STR stat and thought her an easy mark. The clean blow sent him flying backwards and sliding clear of the tiled area, knocked out of the match. Surprised gasps and scattered applause came from the crowd.

From there it was mop-up. A's two-handed swordsman put himself in between the girl and their off-tank as he tried to take advantage of her skill recovery time, and a moment later when she could move again the two of them forced him back with alternating blows against his shield until he backed out of the ring. When I turned to look back at A's tank and left flank, they had encircled the two remaining players and forced them to yield.

Amidst the noise of the cheering, Keita whistled in awe. "Oh man. They're going to be tough to beat. They've really got it down."

I reached over and gave Keita a nudge. "Don't sweat it. Just do your best, and be glad that at the end of the day you're all on the same side."

Keita's intimidated look quickly shifted to—or at least was joined by—a smile as he rose to his feet. "Thanks, Kadyn. Alright everyone—time to show them what the Black Cats are made of!"

Having learned from Team B's ignominious defeat, the Black Cats arranged themselves with Tetsuo in the center, Sasamaru and Ducker on his left, and Keita and the Army guy on his right. They held their own a bit better than B did, but as I watched the battle unfold their main problem was obvious even to me: Tetsuo simply wasn't a great tank. He was _good—_he did fine against mobs, and against a smaller and less-organized group or players I figured he'd probably do well—but more than once Keita ended up having to step in and deflect an attack with his staff in order to give him some breathing room, and when he did their Army recruit got double-teamed.

In the end all that was left was four of A's team—their two-handed swordsman had been ringed out—facing down Tetsuo and Ducker. Testuo, refusing to yield, was being gradually forced towards the edge by a flurry of strikes. But no matter how hard their fencer and the girl with the warhammer pressed Ducker, they couldn't seem to land a blow on them—that kid was _fast._

At last they seemed to have him cornered on the edge of the fighting area, spread just wide enough to force him back but close enough to keep him from dashing between them. When the boy with the rapier lunged at him, Ducker slipped underneath the attack, came up behind him, and grinned impishly as he gave the fencer a shove in the back that sent him stumbling the last few steps out of the ring with a cry of outrage. A wave of laughter briefly washed over the spectators, and Ducker executed a hammy bow for his audience. Then he yelped loudly as he leapt out of the way to avoid the girl's massive warhammer, which slammed into the ground where he'd just been with a blast of purple and a mocking system message.

By then Tetsuo had finally been forced out of bounds, and the only Black Cat left on the field was Ducker, who quickly found himself the focus of attention from four players. As they encircled him, he grinned nervously and held up his hands. "Ya got me, coppers!"

The applause and delighted cheers that followed seemed to have as much to do with Ducker's antics as they did with Team A's second decisive victory. He made such an embarrassing production out of bowing and pretending to throw flowers to the crowd that Keita and Tetsuo came out and bodily dragged him back to the sidelines by the arms.

There were no moments quite so entertaining in the third battle, but against the less-organized Team B the Black Cats did considerably better. Team B had also learned from their defeat, but this time Keita tried something different: he split his group into two pairs of players, and cut Ducker loose to cause havoc with his speed, unpredictability and manic energy. This threw B's hastily-established formation into complete disarray as they tried to cope not only with two different pairs of players who could switch out and cover each other's blind spots, but with Ducker's tendency to be everywhere at once.

It was a long, drawn-out battle, but eventually the team leader of B held up a hand to yield as he and their other remaining player—both of them exhausted—faced down Keita, Sasamaru and Ducker. Everyone could see where this was heading, and it looked like B wanted to go out with some dignity instead of on their asses.

This being the final melee, all of the trainees and more than a few spectators surged out into the town square to cheer and offer mutual congratulations to all the participants. It almost felt like a festival atmosphere, and there was as much or more enthusiasm from the Taft residents who had merely been watching as there was from the training groups who'd taken part in the melee. The reaction seemed to surprise Yurielle and several of the officers; when I headed in their direction to find my wife, I saw startled and confused expressions on their faces.

"I think it's because of what this represents, ma'am," I heard one of Yurielle's officers explaining to her. "They just watched three groups of their own people go head to head and demonstrate just how strong the resistance is going to be if their militia has to deal with bandits. I'd even put _sankumi—_despite their being defeated twice—against most of the bandit types we've seen in the past."

"He's right," Camilla said to Yurielle, giving me a triumphant grin and a wave as she saw me approaching. "The bandits we met were aggressive, but they fought as individuals, not a cohesive team. They'll think twice about facing these patrol groups in battle if they have any idea what they're dealing with, and they'll be sorry if they don't."

Yurielle seemed thoughtful after hearing this, and looked out at the crowd as if seeing it through new eyes. I was thoughtful too, but for an entirely different reason. Something had been nagging at the back of my mind for days, distracting me here and there without really coming far enough into the foreground for the thought to crystallize and take on words. But bits of what my wife had just said brought that nagging thought forward again, and this time I seized at it and refused to let it go. Why should the bandits have any idea of what was in store for them? Why would they be scared off by the strength of the patrols if they didn't—

The idea completed itself right as someone snapped their fingers in front of my face, startling me out of the train of thought. My eyes shot to the right and caught Camilla giving me a look of tolerant amusement as her hand dropped back to her side. "Hi," she said with a wave, ribbing me good-naturedly. "Nice of you to join us. Forest elves?"

"What if the bandits are spying on us?" I said quickly, before the stray thought could escape or anyone else could ask what she meant by that.

There was a brief, uncomfortable lull in the conversation, though with the noise from the crowd and the celebrating militia teams it was far from quiet. "He's got a point, commander," said one of Yurielle's officers—with their helmets on, I couldn't really tell them apart.

"It's not a bad point," Camilla said as she joined me at my side. "We know they have green players watching the town, and if they're not keeping tabs on the training we've been doing they're stupider than I thought."

Suddenly, the crowd of green players wasn't quite so comforting. I looked around to see if I could spot Viyami, or recognize anyone else, but no faces leapt out at me as being familiar. I tried toggling on Searching, but I couldn't detect the cursors of any players hanging out in nearby alleys or off on their own in some suspicious way. Seeing the green aurora flicker across my eyes and recognizing it for what it was, Yurielle looked questioningly at me; I shook my head.

"Actually," I said after a few moments, "we should hope they _are _watching."

That got everyone's attention. Camilla nodded, seeming to understand my line of thinking, but Yurielle's look sharpened and she asked me to explain.

"Think about it. It'd be nice to find and catch them, yes, but at this point it'll do just as much good—with less risk of injury or death—if we can deter them from wanting to attack. There haven't been any attacks on groups or individuals since you started sending out Army patrols, right?"

Yurielle and her staff nodded, and I went on. "Deterrence. The floor's been a lot safer this week, safer than it has been in a while. We don't need to destroy them—just scare them off and make preying on this floor more trouble than it's worth for them. So yeah, I hope they do have someone watching. I hope they get a nice, detailed report of just how screwed they're going to be if they run into the militia. The guys at the top might not be afraid, but it's going to give the lower-level punks they've been grooming something to chew on."

"In case you were wondering," Camilla said after nobody responded right away, looping an arm affectionately around my shoulders, "this is why I love him." I flushed a little; despite being such a small, throwaway comment, the public praise made me happier than I had been in days.

After letting the celebration go on for a minute, Yurielle finally climbed atop the table they'd been using for documents and administrative tasks and blew her whistle for attention.

"Members of the first Taft militia, listen up! Well fought, truly. Hopefully that exercise not only highlighted shortcomings that can be improved, but gave you confidence in your successes. Tonight I'm going to ask the team leaders to join me for a private meeting where we'll be assigning patrol routes and schedules—I'll send each of you a message with details. Tomorrow morning we'll start phasing in your militia to supplement and replace the Army patrols, but don't worry—there'll be a trainer in each patrol group to help coordinate and back you up. In the meantime, I suggest you get some rest and celebrate how far you've come in such a short time. Dismissed!"

As the crowd began to disperse and the celebration become even more informal, Yurielle turned back to us. "Raikeen, you'll be with group one—they're solid; it should be light duty. Camilla, I'm going to ask you to go out with group two—the Black Cats, weren't they called? You're friends, you've worked together before, and they trust you. Sabresaw, you're with group three. They're the weakest link and they could use your expertise with small unit tactics."

Both Camilla and I tried to keep a straight face as we exchanged looks and mouthed _Sabresaw?_ to each other. Some of the character names people came up with…

"What about me?" asked Kibaou, who'd been uncharacteristically silent thus far.

"There are only three militia groups," Yurielle explained as if he was incapable of performing basic arithmetic. "And they're full now. I'd like you to relieve Corporal Mataka and take command of our second squad once they return from patrol. Report to tonight's strategy meeting when you get back."

Then she turned away from Kibaou and addressed the rest of us again, flicking away a stray lock of her hair as the wind threatened to blow it into her face. "That's all for now. I'd rather save anything sensitive for later, when we have some privacy. In the meantime, I'm giving you all the same advice—no, make that an order—get some rest!"

In the case of Camilla and me, getting some rest involved getting to do something we'd barely done for close to a week now: spend time together. Other than watching her during training, about the only times I'd seen her were over dinner and for a couple hours in the evening—by which point in the day she was thoroughly exhausted and not really in the mood to be social. As soon as we got back to our inn room, we changed into casual clothing and decided to take a walk around town.

"I've missed you, you know," I said as we left the inn.

She gave me one of those looks that meant I'd said something endearing but funny. "I missed you too, Kadyn, but really—you're acting like neither of us have ever gone off to work in the morning before."

"I know, I know," I said as I waved at the air. "But this feels different somehow. I know it's something you have to do, and it's the right thing to do. I guess maybe I've just gotten used to how close we've become in the last few months. Stuck here in this world together, fighting for our lives and watching each other's backs… sometimes it really does feel like we're actually adventurers in a fantasy world."

"And then someone does this," Camilla said with a smirk as she made a pinching gesture and opened her game menu with a gentle chiming sound; the windows and menu options hung there in the air like a hologram in a very immersion-breaking way.

"Not really the point," I said, chuckling a little as she swiped her menu closed again. "I think it'd probably be different if we'd gone straight from our days jobs to this, or if the situation wasn't life-and-death—where every time you went out there was a possibility you might not come back."

"You," Camilla said as she grinned and poked me in the ribs, "have become a military spouse."

That stopped me in my tracks, my wife stopping a few paces afterward. I put my face in my palm and shook my head, laughing. "Oh my God, you're right."

"I was joking!" she protested, laughing with me as she slid an arm around my waist.

"I wish I was!" I replied, torn between exasperation and amusement at just how fitting an analogy it was. "But in all seriousness, I really hope your role in this is done soon. If we don't get back out there and start earning EXP again, we're going to get left even further behind."

"Does that really matter?" she asked as we resumed our leisurely pace. "Do you honestly think we're ever going to make it to the front lines? Or that that would be the place for us if we did?"

"I don't know," I answered honestly, my gaze caught by hers. "We've been in this game for what, nearly four months now? And it's almost a third of the way to being cleared. That slowed down a bit after the disaster with the 25th floor boss, but even if the clearing groups keep going at that rate, we'll have been in here for a year by the time the game is cleared."

"I can do the math," Camilla replied. "And?"

"And," I went on, "I'm starting to think that if we don't want to be stuck in here that long, maybe we ought to focus our efforts on trying to catch up and contribute rather than slumming it on the lower floors."

Camilla didn't say anything for a while after that. I knew she was thinking it over rather than ignoring me; I gave her the time to do so as we strolled through the streets of Taft. What Keita had said earlier had stayed with me, and it gelled with some of the worries I'd been having about how our bodies in the real world were faring and just how likely it was that the game would ever be cleared.

A year of our lives, gone. That was the _best-case_ scenario that we could look forward to at the current rate the floors were being cleared. And that was assuming it ever was, and that there wasn't another massive difficulty spike like there had been on the 25th floor.

Nobody liked to dwell on the outside world, on what we'd left behind when Kayaba took us all hostage to his delusions of godhood. That was a ticket to going insane or falling into a suicidal depression, and we knew that had happened to more than a few players. The unspoken agreement in the early days of the game not to talk about the real world had become an ingrained and unquestioned custom, but I wondered sometimes if that was really for the best. So many of the players in SAO were adolescents and teens—people going through a time in their lives where everything and everyone changed and adapted constantly. Sooner or later, after living every waking moment of their lives in this game for months on end with nary a mention of the outside world, their memories of that old life would start to fade. SAO would become the new norm for them. Could we, the players trapped here, maintain the drive to clear this game when it got to the point where the game world was more real to most of us than the one we left?

"I thought we agreed to play it safe?" Camilla asked finally, breaking me out of my thoughts.

"We did," I replied. "We've done pretty well for ourselves, trailing higher-level groups and cleaning up their repops and discarded loot. I'm just saying, maybe there are ways we could contribute to clearing the game that don't necessarily involve fighting on the front lines. Maybe we should be a little more concerned about that."

My wife nodded, absently tapping at her lips with a fingertip as she thought. "Maybe," she said finally, turning and favoring me with a slight smile. "Alright, we'll discuss it and see if we can't come up with a plan. But I can't think about that right now. Right now, we have a problem in front of us and we need to focus on that, confront it head-on. Otherwise we'd just spend all of our time on the front lines watching our backs and wondering when these assholes are going to come after us again."

"You sound like you're planning to take the fight to them again," I said cautiously.

Her smile broadened, and she squeezed my shoulder reassuringly. "Not exactly," she said. "Not the way you're probably thinking. But I won't shed any tears if they make the mistake of crossing my path."


	14. Fetch Quest

"Time to go," Camilla said as she leaned over the bed and dropped a goodbye kiss on my cheek, her hair tickling my skin. "Let me guess: another exciting day exploring Taft while I'm out protecting the not-necessarily-innocent."

"You never know," I said as I opened my eyes to slits. "Somewhere in town there might be a few pixels on the map that're still fogged out." I paused, looking up at my wife and blinking in momentary confusion. "It's going to take me forever to get used to that."

My wife grinned and reached up, brushing her fingertips against red hair that was now cut a few centimeters above shoulder length. "It'll take some getting used to for me too," she said. "I keep wanting to reach up and tie it back. I just got sick of it getting snagged in my armor is all."

It was hard to fault her reasons, but I was going to miss her long hair—and being able to make her purr by untangling it with my fingers. I pulled the covers up over my face in defense against the encroaching sunlight and rolled over. "You look beautiful," I said, voice muffled by the fabric. "Now get going; the Cats are waiting for you."

What was waiting for me was—I hoped—a couple more hours of sleep. I'd set my alarm to the same time as hers so that I'd be awake to see her off—so to speak—but I reasoned that any time thereafter I spent sleeping was time _not_ spent in an apocalyptic state of boredom.

But there was something about the unwaveringly perfect nature of SAO's simulations of physical stimuli that made it really difficult to get back to sleep once I'd awakened if I wasn't still exhausted—I would just drift in and out of a muddled daydream state. So when it was obvious no further sleep was forthcoming, I gathered my wits and sought out breakfast at the pub.

As usual, the meal afforded me plenty of time to zone out and plan out the day ahead. I'd probably been in almost every NPC building in the town, and while I was sure I was missing any number of quests, thus far the only ones I'd discovered were the hunting quests I'd mentioned to my wife days before—quests which were still sitting in my journal, untouched. As for the rest, the trick was knowing exactly what conditions triggered the quest. The game didn't always drop it right in your lap.

About midway through my bowl of _ochazuke_, it occurred to me that I hadn't really been making the most of my local sources of information. The Black Cats might be off patrolling with Camilla, but they weren't the only friends we had in the area. So when Hinami came to take my bowl away, I stopped her and asked.

"Quests?" Hinami said, balancing several plates in the crook of her arm and setting my bowl on top of them. "I know there are, but I couldn't tell you where to find them. Want me to ask Parida?"

"That'd be great," I said. "Let her know I'm looking for something I can solo to kill time while Camilla's off with the Army."

Hinami's head of purple hair bounced off to the kitchen, but rather than returning with an answer she returned with Parida at her side, who slid into the seat across from me. "Morning, Kadyn. Hinami said you wanted to know about the local quests?"

"Solo quests, specifically," I clarified. "Camilla's off patrolling with the Army so I've got some time to kill. Are there any simple fetch quests I can grind for EXP while I'm here?"

"A few," Parida answered, playing with one of her braids with one hand as she dragged open her menu with the other. Scooting her chair over next to mine, she set the visibility on her UI so that I could see it and drilled down into her completed quests sub-menu, pointing at several entries. "These three are pretty simple, and except for the _Hens for Highcroft_ quest they don't even take you outside of Taft.

"Please tell me that one does not actually involve transporting poultry."

Parida laughed ruefully. "You asked for fetch quests. The other two are just running stuff from one NPC to another within Taft, but the EXP you get from them is about what you'd expect from that—you'd be better off pulling squirrels in the Taftwood. You should have at least one other person along for _Hens _anyway; it involves a short trek east up the Taft Foothills."

As I nodded, she paused and then said: "You know, if you want to do that one I could probably get away for a while. This place doesn't really pick up until the early evening anyway."

"Sure!" Hinami called cheerfully from across the room. "Now that you ask, I totally don't mind staying here and watching the pub for hours while you go do stuff. Thanks Parida!"

I snorted while Parida hid her face. I had to admit that some company would probably make a boring fetch quest—what my wife, in English gamer jargon, called a _FedEx quest_—pass more quickly. "If neither of you mind," I said, "I'd be happy for the help. Are you sure, though? That doesn't look like a repeatable quest, so if you've already done it…"

"I can gather," Parida said, waving at the air. "Don't worry about me. That's the nice thing about the Cooking skill—no matter where I go or what I do, I can usually find some useful ingredients." She swiped her quest menu closed and tapped out a few commands; a party invite popped up into my view. I reached up to accept it, hesitating with my finger centimeters away from the interface. I knew it was a dumb thing to get hung up about, but right then I had the thought that this would be the first time in SAO I'd partied with anyone but Camilla while she wasn't there.

_As if she'd be bothered by something so stupid_, I thought, annoyed with myself for getting bent out of shape about nothing. The moment passed, and I accepted the invite. Parida's HP bar appeared in the upper left corner of my HUD, just below mine.

If Parida noticed my hesitation, she didn't comment on it. I saw her eyes go up and to her left before returning to me with a smile. "There we go. Give me a minute to get equipped and we'll go be chicken couriers."

Chicken couriers. If there had been an enthusiasm gauge in my HUD, it'd be flashing red as it emptied.

The fetch quest turned out to be exactly as dumb as it sounded. There was a small farm on the southern outskirts of Taft, and we had to go find the farmer NPC on the second floor of the barn and ask him if he needed any help. He presented us with three large cages containing chickens, and told us to deliver them to the tiny town of Highcroft on the eastern edge of the floor. It wasn't a very long trek, but it was across the Glimmerbrook and all uphill into the Foothills from there. Worse, one look at the status windows for the chicken cage objects revealed the catch for the quest: the cages were too big to store in a player's inventory; they had to be physically _carried_ to their destination.

"You're _kidding_ me," I said, seriously considering abandoning the quest right there and then. Fighting bandits was starting to look appealing by comparison.

Parida slapped me on the back, then stopped to make sure her staff was securely fastened to hers as she crouched and slipped her fingers under one of the cages, looking for the best spot from which to lift it. "Easy EXP, Kadyn. Normally it'd take three trips, but with two sets of hands it'll only take two. Most of the route is on a marked path, but we should be able to pull a few mobs on the way too. It'll take us maybe two or three hours, and I brought lunch for us."

That got my attention. When I put things in perspective, I had a competent and knowledgeable local player taking time she didn't have to take in order to help me do a quest she'd already done, and she'd brought lunch for both of us in the bargain. And being no more immune to such things than anyone else with a Y chromosome, the fact that she was reasonably cute didn't hurt—especially since I had no intention of doing anything about that and didn't get the impression she would either.

Given all of that, I shut up, expressed my gratitude, and picked up a chicken coop.

"So what is this place, Highcroft? You said it was to the east up in the Foothills?"

"That's right," Parida said, the free ends of her braids swaying as she jerked her head in that general direction. "In the in-game lore I guess it's some kind of mining village, though I don't think there's actually a mine up there. It's got a small trading post, an NPC smith, and not a hell of a lot else. If you're grinding in Weilan Marsh, or in some parts of the Foothills, it's quicker to go there than all the way back to Taft if you need to repair."

"But they apparently need chickens," I said, grunting as I shifted the load in my arms.

"Hens," said Parida, startling her passengers when she laughed. "Just wait until you turn in the quest. You'll get a choice of whether you want to be paid in eggs or coin. It's not much money, so if you take the eggs I can cook something for you guys tonight."

"Far be it from me to argue with one of your meals," I said, the praise sincere. "I've been meaning to ask, how does your business work? Is there an NPC that owns the pub or something?"

"Something like that. When we first got here, it was NPC-run and basically just served the usual dodgy food you get from them. But the owner was the starter for a series of crafting quests that involved running all over and gathering samples of pretty much every basic ingredient you'll find on this floor, then cooking stuff with them for the pub."

"I didn't know there were crafting quests like that," I said with some surprise.

"Neither did I, until then. I learned a bunch of new recipes in the process, so I kept going with that quest line and taking notes. And after close to two weeks of nearly non-stop work, I got to a point where the owner confided that he'd been planning to retire and offered to sell his business to me. I couldn't say no—and we've been here ever since."

"Do you—" I stopped there, my mouth getting ahead of my brain.

"Do I cook in real life?" Parida said, coming uncomfortably close to the exact words that had almost come out of my mouth. She laughed. "Oh hell no. I obsess over food magazines, but I could burn water. There's just something about the Cooking system in SAO that clicked with me. It's less like real cooking and more like a puzzle where you put everything in a microwave at the end. _That_ I can do."

We spent a considerable amount of time going over the way the mechanics of the Cooking skill worked in SAO. There was a time when I'd seriously thought about picking it up, but any ambitions to do so died as I learned more and more about it. It sounded like the kind of thing that would be absolutely fascinating to try to figure out if I'd had any real interest in the science of food beyond the eating of it. Since I didn't, it struck me as a recipe for tedium.

But it was at least interesting to _listen_ to, especially when the person doing the talking was someone with a sincere passion for it who managed to make the explanations entertaining.

And since Parida had opened the door to talking about our lives before SAO, it eventually gave me the opportunity to ask something else I'd been wondering about.

"Hinami and I were college roommates," Parida answered, her eyes growing distant for a moment. "I was the one who was geeking out over SAO before it came out, and I got so tired of her teasing me about it that I told her I'd split the cost of a Nerve Gear for her if she'd just shut up and try it with me." She turned and gave me a rueful look. "We all know how that worked out."

"Shit," I said eloquently.

"Yeah. She's a quick learner, but she's not really a gamer. So I feel kind of responsible for her being here, and I've been doing my best to take care of her. It's one of the reasons I bought the pub—I think it lets her pretend on some level that she's just a waitress instead of a prisoner in a death game."

"Makes me wonder just how many players in SAO were people like her—people who'd never played a video game in their lives, or who just joined up because their brother or daughter or best friend was obsessed with it and they wanted to see what all the hype was about."

"Too many, I'll bet," Parida said sadly. It was obvious that she still felt really guilty about getting Hinami involved in SAO, and I felt bad for pulling it out of the back of her mind and into the light.

Seeing a chance to change the subject, I freed one of my fingers from under the chicken coop and used it to point awkwardly off to my right. "Hey, can we clear those bobcats? I picked up a hunting quest in Taft to bring back 10 pelts."

"Oh, you're on _that_ quest. Sure, but keep in mind the pelt drops are uncommon. We might clear that whole group and only get one or two."

I was grateful for an excuse to set down my load. Rubbing at both arms to banish some of the soreness, I drew my dagger and eyed the nearest bobcat. "Even though they're solo mobs, this is going to be interesting without a tank," I said. "I guess there's not much point in worrying about managing aggro."

"Nope," Parida said as she unslung her staff and gave it a twirl. "What's that phrase some of the hardcore types use? 'Tank and spank'?"

I cackled loudly enough to cause one of the Foothills Bobcats to turn and eye me warily. It was a good thing they were non-aggro mobs. "Yeah, it basically means there's no finesse to the fight—just burn it down as fast as you can."

"Works for me," Parida said, snapping the staff into a ready position. "Pull?"

"Incoming," I said as we both rushed the mob.

Since it was the first time I'd partied with anyone else in SAO without my wife, it was also the first time I'd fought in SAO without her tanking. It was a completely different experience—a little tougher than I was used to when duoing with Camilla, but far more manageable than the nightmare of PvP. It was probably just as well that these were fairly weak lower-level animal mobs.

Parida struck first, her staff turning into a glowing yellow blur as she opened with a three-hit jabbing combo. The Foothills Bobcat turned and leapt at her, and I ran around behind it and waited for it to hit the recovery frame of the attack it had just launched. It only paused for a moment, but that was long enough for me to critically stab it in the back, leaving only a sliver of HP. Although my recovery pause was even shorter, before I could follow up my attack I saw the steel-shod end of Parida's staff flash in an arc and crush the head of the bobcat mob. It shimmered and burst into polygons, and when it did I saw the cursors of the other two bobcats in the area turn red.

"Adds!" I said quickly, tapping my dagger and opening an options menu. A bobcat was already leaping at Parida; she just barely sidestepped and swung the other end of her staff around, hitting the mob in midair and smacking it to the ground. The other mob aggroed me, but by then I was ready for it—I ducked out of the way of its leaping attack, and slashed once as it passed. The mob went tumbling bonelessly into the dirt as the consumable Status Tip on the dagger inflicted a two-second Paralysis effect. It was long enough for me to rush in and stab at the mob until its death animation sprayed me with glittering green polygons.

I looked back at Parida, and saw her bobcat rake her across the leg with its claws. It didn't reduce her HP by much, but she yelled angrily as she executed a series of staff techniques that rapidly burned down the remainder of her opponent's life. She kept beating the ground where the bobcat had been until the last of its polygons had evaporated into the air.

"I think it's dead," I said a little wryly, checking the durability on my dagger and making sure I hadn't taken any damage.

"Sorry," she said as she leaned on her staff. "That just caught me off-guard. Why'd they attack us?"

"Probably social aggro," I said. "Non-aggro mobs won't attack you unless you attack them, but some will also attack if you kill any other mobs of the same type too close to them. Want to use a pot before we move on?"

Parida shook her head, securing her staff again on her back and picking up the chicken coop. "Nah. We're not far from Highcroft now—five or ten minutes' walk, maybe, and by then that scratch will heal. Let's drop these off; we've got one more trip to make and we can pull some more mobs on the way back."

As it turned out, Parida's description of Highcroft had been quite generous. There might've been a dozen structures in the entire settlement—the most notable of which were a mill with a water wheel driven by the branch of the Glimmerbrook river that passed through the edge of town, the NPC smith she'd mentioned, and a pair of NPC vendors that shared space under a canvas awning backed by a makeshift-looking one-story building of rough logs. The remainder seemed to be NPC residences that we probably couldn't enter; there didn't seem to be any lodging for players anywhere. It was clearly intended as nothing other than a waypoint for travelers to repair and restock.

After dropping off the first load of chickens with the miller, we visited the NPC shops to top off the durability of our equipment and vendor our trash. I checked the time; almost noon. Which meant—

"Hey, want to stop here for lunch?" Parida pointed at a rocky edge near the outskirts of the town's Safe Zone that looked like it ended in an abrupt drop. "There's a really nice view over there. It's a great picnic spot."

Walking over and examining the recommended location, I found it hard to argue. I'd been right about the abrupt drop, but didn't realize just how much of a drop it was until I peered over the side: it was probably a good fifty meters to the mossy rocks far below, and when I looked a ways off to my right I could see the Glimmerbrook spilling over the precipice and continuing its journey across the 11th floor from there. A fine mist rose from the bottom of the waterfall, the wind blowing it in waves that made it look almost like smoke, save for the faint rainbow and the cool feeling of the almost-aerosolized moisture on my skin.

It was a _damn fine_ picnic spot.

"Challenge accepted," I said, sinking down into a cross-legged position and stretching my arms high above my head. "What's for lunch?"

In lieu of an answer, Parida opened her menu and summoned a pair of _furoshiki_-wrapped packages from her inventory, handing me one. When I undid the cloth and opened it, I whistled softly in appreciation. It was very nearly a proper _bento_, with a bed of rice in one compartment and a mixture of pickled vegetables in another, topped off with sesame seeds and slices of fish that I assumed were from either the Glimmerbrook or one of the floor's lakes.

"Can we hire you to make all of our adventuring rations?" I asked hopefully, not entirely in jest.

Parida laughed, blushing a little. "Maybe, but I should warn you that these don't keep for long—you guys would have to come back every day for them, fresh. The durability runs out in a matter of hours."

"Well, it looks amazing," I said sincerely. "About the only thing it's missing is—"

"Soy sauce," Parida said, sighing wistfully and handing me a pair of chopsticks.

"Yeah. But I'm not complaining—believe me, I'm not. Thank you so much for making and bringing these."

Parida smiled and lifted the lid off of her own lunch. "My pleasure. _Itadakimasu_."

Obviating my last concern, the meal actually tasted as good as it looked. As we sat there in peaceful relative silence and ate, I looked out across the Taft Foothills and just absorbed the stunning view, taking in the little details. I could see Taft itself in the distance far below our current elevation, maybe two or three kilometers away. It was an island of civilization in the midst of what from here looked like a vast stretch of farmland and prairie bordered on the far side by an even vaster forest. The heights of the Taft Foothills were in between where we sat and Weilan Marsh, but I knew it was just over the ridge to the north, on the other side of the Glimmerbrook.

Sometimes, looking at things like this, it was very hard to remember that we were living in a virtual world—that everything we were seeing was a mere simulation of life and reality.

"It's places like this that make me love this world despite hating being stuck here," Parida said as she finished, eyes drawn to the same scenic vista that I'd spent so much time admiring. "If that makes sense."

"It does," I said. "Just because Kayaba committed a horrible crime against all of us by trapping our minds in here doesn't mean that there isn't beauty in Aincrad if you look for it." I picked up a rock and threw it over the edge, watching as it tumbled for a long time before splashing into the river where it continued far below. "Think about everything that went into making that happen just now. The game has to simulate gravity, air resistance, wind, mass, and a thousand other bits of physics just to make that rock fall exactly right, spinning in a way that's appropriate to the way it rolled out of my fingers. It disturbed the mist on the way down, which means that the mist is simulated and not just a particle effect. And that's not even getting into the fluid simulation when it hit the water. I'd bet that if you went down there and waded into the river, you'd find that very rock sitting on the bottom somewhere."

I looked over at Parida, expecting to see her nodding along. Instead, I caught her staring at me oddly as if I'd been babbling incomprehensibly in English. "What?" I said.

"You," she replied, "are a very strange man."

My cheeks heated a little in embarrassment as I realized how I'd been going on at length about what the back-end simulations in SAO must be like, when she'd been talking purely about the aesthetics of the scene. "Sorry," I said. "I'm a game developer. Was."

"Did you work on SAO?" she asked, her tone abruptly uncomfortable.

I shook my head quickly. "No, just stupid little casual games, like the kind you find on social media sites. I've always wanted to work on RPGs, but it's hard to break into that industry."

The answer seemed to relax Parida slightly; her shoulders lost some of the tension they'd suddenly taken on. We were both quiet for another minute or so, at which point she used her staff to push herself slowly up to her feet, stretching. "Let's get going," she said. "We've got one more trip to make, and you get to carry the third coop."

"Joy," I said, grinning as I came to my feet. "Hey, in case I didn't mention, thanks for taking the time to do this with me. I've been bored out of my skull for the last week, and I needed to get out and do something to earn some EXP."

"It's fine," she said, waving off anything further and smiling. "You guys are friends. It's been a nice change of pace."

"That reminds me," I said. "I don't think we've actually friended you yet. You mind?"

"Not at all." She opened her menu and tapped a few times; a friend request popped up in my view and I immediately accepted it.

"Anyway, let's get this over and done with. Hinami didn't sound too happy when you left."

Parida laughed as we headed towards the small covered wooden bridge over the Glimmerbrook that marked the edge of town. "Oh don't worry, she was mostly yanking my chain. As long as I come back with more ingredients for our stores, she doesn't really mind. She likes the job—like I said, I think it helps her forget that she's trapped here."

The vast majority of the journey between Taft and Highcroft wound back and forth through the Taft Foothills, which began as the rolling hills of their namesake and gradually became rockier and steeper as they got closer to the cliff on the eastern edge of the floor where we'd had our picnic. Our return route took us through a series of winding foot paths that dipped in and out of shallow canyons before softening into hills.

At the western end of one of these narrow canyons was a player.

When we came around the corner and saw a person in a cloak standing there, it was quite startling—and not a little bit unsettling. Both of us came to a halt, and I focused immediately on the other player in suspicion—relaxing only a little when I saw that their cursor was green. From the shape of the clothing, my guess was that it was a woman—but under the cloak and with clothing that baggy, it was hard to tell.

Parida had been using her staff as a walking stick, and although she didn't have it pointed at the other player in a threatening way, she held it in a way that made it clear she was ready to use it. "Can we help you?" she asked.

The player reached up and pushed back the hood of her cloak. Air raid sirens went off in my head when I recognized who it was. Green light fleeted across my eyes as I toggled on Searching, and immediately picked up multiple orange cursors behind rocks and on the ledges above. I cursed myself for not using the skill sooner.

"I'm sorry," Viyami said as she blocked our path. I hated her even more for sounding like she truly meant it.

"Run, Parida!" I yelled as I drew my dagger and looked around, trying to take stock of how many I faced and where they were.

Parida looked at me strangely, confused. I realized she couldn't see what I could and didn't know who Viyami was.

"RUN!" I screamed as a full party of orange players emerged from their hiding places or dropped down from above, surrounding us. Realizing the situation too late, she ran straight at Viyami, spinning her staff above her head. Viyami's eye's widened, as if she hadn't expected a green player to attack her instead of one of her orange comrades. She dove out of the way, unintentionally clearing a path.

A bandit with a dagger and a tiny buckler rushed at me, a skill beginning to light up the blade of his weapon. Instead of dodging, I ran at him to throw off his timing and rolled to the ground at the last moment. As I came up to one knee, I slashed at the back of his leg with my dagger and tried to sweep him off his feet. It didn't work, but it did send him stumbling in the wrong direction as he tried to recover his balance. A player with an ugly-looking two-handed war axe chopped down at me, and only another diving roll saved me from taking the hit.

"Alive, goddamnit!" I heard one of the bandits yell. Those two words changed things. If they meant to take me alive, it meant they had to hold back.

I didn't.

A grazing blow from a sword took me in the back of the shoulder as I came to my feet, and without indulging in the distraction of looking at my HP I ran towards the only opening I saw, dashing at the wall of the cliff. Two bandits were right behind me, and just as I reached the wall I decided to try something ballsy: I jumped, kicked off the wall, and flipped over my two pursuers to land behind them.

It would've never worked in real life, but until that moment I'd never been happier that I'd filled my most recent skill slot with Acrobatics. Without wasting the opportunity, I executed a multi-hit dagger technique directly into the back of one of the bandits, the critical hit slamming him against the wall of the canyon with almost two thirds of his HP gone.

Then I felt a blade against my neck, and knew it was over.


	15. Hunting Armed Men

The bandits might've wanted me alive, but when I felt cold steel kissing the side of my neck my sense of self-preservation took over at a primal level. I froze completely, oddly grateful at that moment to not even have the involuntary movement of breathing to risk that sharp edge sinking into me.

"That's better," said a horrifyingly familiar voice behind me. "The dagger. Now."

My weapon fell from limp fingers before I could even think about what I was doing. I didn't even dare look down to see when it hit the ground. I could hear movement beside me, and the scrape of metal on stone as someone picked up the weapon I'd dropped.

The blade left my neck, but was replaced just as quickly by the tip of another—possibly even my own—pricking me in the back. "Nice dagger. Here's how this is going to work," the voice of the man who'd killed Niara and Reznor whispered in my ear, his breath a light, nauseating sensation on my cheek. "You're going to open your menu. You're going to set it visible so I can watch what you're doing. You're going to unequip everything and drop your armor on the ground. And you're going to do it without screwing around, stalling, or trying anything clever." The tip of the blade pressed a little bit; I could see a few hit points disappear from my gauge.

I started to turn my head and look around, and only barely caught a glimpse of Parida—held captive much as I was—before the tip of the blade dug in further and a hand forced my head to face forward. From somewhere deep inside, I found the courage to speak. "I thought you wanted me alive."

"Don't overestimate your usefulness. Now do it." When I hesitated further, he spoke again. "Or do you need encouragement? We could play the poison game with your friend here. I seem to recall that didn't work out so well for you last time."

Rage flared in me and emboldened my tongue. "Or for you."

The blade in my back pushed in again; this time the HP loss was noticeable. "But your Valkyrie isn't here now, is she? In fact, if my information is correct she should be on the far side of the Taftwood right about now. Now don't fuck with me, boy. Last chance before someone dies."

Hating myself for it, I reached up and dragged my menu open, setting it visible to others and hitting the _Unequip All_ button in my status screen. A cool breeze touched my skin all over, and one by one I dropped the unequipped pieces of leather armor on the ground in front of me. One of the bandits came and picked them up, stowing them in his own inventory.

I felt the blade withdraw from my back, leaving behind a vaguely numb sensation. A hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me around, turning me to face Parida. Her HP bar was deep in the yellow, and she was held captive by a familiar-looking bandit who had her staff in one hand. Conscious that I was standing there in my underwear, I couldn't meet her eyes.

"Kadyn—" Conflict and fear were warring on her face.

That hateful voice behind me spoke again, cutting her off. "You're going to live for me to hunt you again, little girl—but only because I want you to deliver a message. Tell the Red Valkyrie—no, tell _Rebecca_ that we have her boy toy."

The use of my wife's real name sent ice flowing through my body. When the hell did he learn that?

Parida nodded quickly, her eyes wide and her expression appropriately terrified. "O-okay."

"Tell her that if she ever wants to see him again, to come unarmed and alone to a dock on the western shore of the Weilan lake before sundown. And she'd _better_ be alone—there's nowhere to hide in the grassy hills around there; we'll know if there's anyone even remotely nearby. Can you remember that?"

"W-western shore. Weilan lake."

"Alone and unarmed, before sundown. Mallek, give her something to help her memory."

_That_ was why he looked familiar. Mallek looked over in my direction at the man standing behind me, confusion showing briefly. The leader must've gestured or given him a look that I couldn't see, because a few moments later he swung and struck her hard in the belly with her own staff, doubling her over with a gasp. The staff descended again, harder, cracking her across the back and driving her face-first into the dirt with a red sliver of HP remaining in her gauge. I heard Viyami yell his name.

"That's enough, you dumb shit," the leader said. "She can't deliver a message if she's fucking _dead_."

"A-alone and unarmed!" Parida pleaded from the ground, crying as she attempted to pick herself back up. "I get it. Alone and unarmed. Before sundown."

"Good. Now run along, little girl."

"Go, Parida," I urged—both so that she would have a chance to survive this and so that my wife would know what was going on. "Tell Camilla what happened."

"Yes, Parida," said the murderous bastard behind me, his tone smug and mocking. "Go and tell her everything."

At some unseen signal, Mallek dropped Parida's staff in front of her. Once she'd used it push herself back to her feet he yanked her around by the back of the neck, turning her to face downhill, and gave her a solid kick in the ass. She staggered, gave me one last tormented look over her shoulder, and then ran for her life. A partial sense of relief flooded through me.

I felt fabric of some kind—a bag, perhaps—settle over my head, cutting off my vision, and someone bound my hands behind my back. I could still see my HUD superimposed over the blackness, and beside my HP gauge there was an icon that looked like an eye with a circle and backslash over it—the symbol for the Blindness status effect. I'd only seen it a few times when struck by higher-level monsters that inflicted it, but I supposed the game must treat having your vision completely blocked off the same way. It was frustrating—had this been actual fabric in the real world, I would've gotten at least some kind of light filtering through, and perhaps even been able to see something of my surroundings through the weave. But to the game, the fabric was simply a solid object that blocked visibility.

"I don't know what kind of weird stuff you guys are into," I said as a hand grabbed the rope binding my hands and started guiding me in an unknown direction. "But some clothes would be nice."

A blow struck me in the back of the head, doing no damage but delivering the message all the same. "Shut up and walk." I did.

We must've traveled for hours over every conceivable kind of terrain. It wasn't long before my bare feet were sore and tired, and with no conversation or visual stimuli, I had plenty of time to ponder that. It struck me as odd that damage from combat would never inflict anything recognizable as pain—just a sense of numbness—but that plenty of other conditions in the game, including exhaustion and overuse, could result in soreness and discomfort. How and where did the system draw the line between combat damage and the other sort, and decide whether or not to inflict discomfort? Was the numbness and pain suppression related specifically to the loss of HP?

I pushed aside the irrelevancy and tried to focus on my predicament. It was a little after one in the afternoon when we were ambushed, and we'd been going for a few hours now. Parida and I were still partied, so I knew she was still alive: I could see her HP bar under mine, and it was green; I assumed she'd done the smart thing and used a potion as soon as she could.

If Parida ran like hell the whole way and didn't have to stop to fight any mobs, she could probably get back to Taft in about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. More realistically about an hour to an hour and a half; the path back was over 4 kilometers of winding trails and uneven terrain, and she'd be exhausted. Camilla wasn't due back from patrol until around 4 PM, but Parida might be able to find someone to get a message to her before then.

So at the earliest, it was possible that my wife already knew what had happened. Worst case, it might be another hour or two. Finding me wouldn't be a problem—since we were married, she should be able to see my location on her map. For that matter, as a party member so would Parida.

The question was: what then?

It was damn certain I wasn't in a position to be making any escape attempts. Unarmed and in my underwear, trying to run with painfully bare feet across kilometers of rough, hostile terrain filled with aggro mobs—even if I could get away, it would be just a creative, protracted way of committing suicide. But if my wife showed up the way they demanded, unarmed and with no one to back her up… she'd have to know they intended to kill both of us. I couldn't see her just leaving me here, but I almost wished she'd do that rather than walking into an obvious trap.

One way or another, I was pretty well fucked. I was surprised to find that this realization didn't send me into a catatonic stupor. Rather than despair, the inevitability of my fate focused me and filled me with a cold, rational calm that I'd seldom felt before when my life was in danger. I wondered for a moment if that was what it was like to be my wife—if that was how she dealt with it so well.

I hoped I'd get the chance to ask her.

After some time spent with the muddy ground of the wetlands squelching through my toes, the odors from the nearby marsh were joined by the cleaner smell of an open body of water, and I could hear water lapping at a shore. The hand holding my bindings jerked me to a stop, and someone roughly yanked the bag off of my head. The sudden assault of the late afternoon sun on my dark-adapted eyes made me blink uncomfortably as I looked around.

As I'd suspected, we stood on the shore of a medium-sized lake, a rickety dock that looked cobbled together from logs and scrap lumber jutting out into the water for several meters. To the southeast I could see the dense, nearly impenetrable barrier of Weilan Marsh along the shoreline; from what I knew of the 11th floor's topography I assumed the Weilan Mountains must be directly behind me. It was probably a little over a kilometer to the eastern shore of the mist-shrouded lake, where I could faintly see a great stone structure rising. As I peered into the distance, I could see a modest boat being rowed slowly across the lake towards us.

"Weilan Keep," I said, realizing suddenly where we had to be going. "That's where you've been hiding all this time?"

I heard a low chuckle behind me. "You people really are dense to have not figured that out by now. Other than spending days raiding your way through the swamp with a huge party, the only way to get to Weilan Keep is by crossing the lake. It's more secure than anywhere else on this floor."

The player rowing the boat threw a line to another orange player standing on the dock, who used it to secure the boat. A shove in my back sent me stumbling forward. "Watch your step getting into the boat."

"I didn't know you cared."

"Don't be an idiot. You're no good to me as bait if you're fish bait instead. Move."

I restrained further comments about who the real _bakayaro_ was here, and carefully stepped off of the low dock into the boat. For the first time in months I saw the face of my assailant as he got in and seated himself opposite me. He wore no armor at all that I could see, although most of his body was shaded under a tattered cloak of some rough dark green material. He still wore the hood over his head, but now that I saw him in better light I could see a man who looked to be around my age and perhaps a little older—maybe even early, mid 30s. Wavy dishwater-blond hair came down to the level of his broad cleft chin, although it was styled somewhat unevenly, and I could faintly see what looked like either a scar or some kind of marking on his right cheek. I couldn't tell the color of his eyes, shaded as they were beneath the hood, but they stared back at me without a trace of compassion that I could find.

This wasn't a PKer out for kicks, or someone who didn't buy Kayaba's explanation about the death game. Those were the eyes of a killer who knew exactly what he was—and had made his peace with it.

Mallek, Viyami and another bandit clambered into the boat after us, leaving three more bandits guarding the dock. The leader called out to those who remained as the boat cast off. "Stay here. When the Valkyrie shows up, transmit a message to the boatman. I'll send him over with reinforcements to pick her up."

Burdened with six people, the boat was riding low in the water and moving slowly across the lake to our destination. I thought hard about my options. If my icon suddenly disappeared from Camilla's map, or my HP gauge from Parida's HUD, they'd know right away that I was dead—and my wife would know not to come walk into the trap. I gave serious thought to diving over the side and drowning myself, and thought even harder about trying to capsize the boat and take all of its passengers with me.

After thinking it through, I realized I couldn't do it. As long as there was the slightest chance of rescue, I wanted to live. Moreover, I couldn't do that to my wife—my death would be devastating to her, especially if it was for nothing. It might well trigger her into killing every single orange player on this floor, but I couldn't cause her that much pain—to say nothing of what the aftermath would do to her.

As if reading my thoughts or following my eyes, the PK leader smirked and spoke aloud. "Don't bother—I can swim just fine. I'd much rather have the Valkyrie delivered to me, but your death would still hurt her plenty. Maybe even demoralize her so that she gives up this little crusade of hers."

I snorted, putting as much derision as I could into the simple expression. "Then you _really_ don't know her."

He leaned forward, eyes locked to mine. "Oh, but I'd _like_ to. I have so many things I'd love to ask her while we slowly cut her to pieces. There are ways to get around the way the game suppresses pain from damage, boy—and there are worse things than pain. Perhaps I'll let you be the one to kill her when she can't take any more and begs for death." The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile. "And in the end, if you're a good boy, I might even let you go so that you can tell all those children playing toy soldiers out there exactly what happens to people who get in our way."

I stared at the empty person sitting across from me. "You are one seriously sick fuck."

The leader laughed, sounding genuinely amused. "I'm sorry, is your opinion supposed to bother me?"

"It ought to if there's a shred of a soul anywhere in you." I wanted to look around at Mallek and Viyami to see how they were reacting to this exchange, but they were behind me.

"Ah," the leader said, nodding sagely. "I think I see. This is the part where you appeal to my humanity, yes?"

"No. I don't think you have any. I just don't understand what you get out of all this. This is more than just trying to uphold your reputation as Aincrad's unofficial cartoon villains. This is a _hobby_ for you."

The man facing me was silent for a few moments, though I strongly doubted I'd actually gotten through to him—or that there was anything there to get at if I had. "'There is no hunting like the hunting of man,'" he said finally, speaking in English with a fair accent. "'And those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.'"

"Hemingway," I said immediately, having had to translate that passage from _On the Blue Water_ in English class.

For the first time, the PKer looked as if I'd surprised him. The smile he gave me then was warm, although it was the sickly warmth of a fever dream. "Then you understand."

"No, I really don't," I said, returning the conversation to Japanese so that I could better frame what I wanted to say, the chill of contempt in my voice. "Hemingway was talking about veteran soldiers who couldn't find joy in anything else after the thrill of combat. Whatever you once were on the outside world, in here you're nothing but a serial killer—the grown-up version of a pathetic, cowardly bully who probably tortured squirrels for fun."

Anger flashed briefly in his eyes before he mastered it and smiled again, the previous warmth gone. "Ah. And this would be the part where you try to taunt me into killing you prematurely."

Since I hadn't actually been trying to do that and preferred that he wouldn't, I said nothing.

"News flash: I don't really care what you think, boy. You're nothing but a tool to me—and you'd better hope you remain useful."

"Just like all the bandits you're using," I shot back. "How long until they figure out that you'll discard them the moment you don't think they're useful anymore?" I hoped that question and whatever answer he gave burned in the ears of the other four on the boat.

The leader barked a laugh. "You think they don't? Look at the people you're dealing with, boy. Nobody here has any illusions about what we mean to each other. The orange players on this floor follow us because we've given them purpose and made people fear them. Some few of them might even be good enough to join us eventually."

I could hear faint conversations carrying across the water, and saw one of the bandits carefully stand up and uncoil the rope used to secure the boat to the dock, throwing it at someone out of my view. Moments later I felt a hollow bump as the side of the boat contacted one of the pilings. Turning my head, I saw a makeshift camp of about fifteen deployable tents arranged in a semicircle around the grand arch of the entrance to Weilan Keep. A rusted portcullis was frozen in position halfway down, vines twined around it and crawling up to the gatehouse. Those same vines formed an uneven carpet of green across the gray stone of the keep's crumbling walls, looking as if the growth had slowly picked apart the stone over centuries. Just beyond the keep itself I could see the treeline of Weilan Marsh, the dense canopy shutting out most of the early evening sunlight and turning the depths of the swamp into a rapidly fading twilight.

"Out," said the PK leader, interrupting my thoughts as he rose and leapt onto the dock in one fluid motion.

"I'm gonna need my hands for that," I said.

At a nod from the leader, I felt someone undo the ropes binding me. I rubbed my tingling wrists for a few moments and then climbed carefully out of the boat, followed closely by Mallek and Viyami.

"It's been so nice talking to you," the leader said to me with dry sarcasm. "Now it's time for you to shut up and stay put until your dear Valkyrie comes to trade herself for you." He pointed at Viyami and jerked his head towards the campsite. "You. Make yourself useful and tie him to that post over there. Mallek, Ralfen, come with me."

As the three of them turned and headed towards the keep itself, I felt a hand settle gently on my shoulder. "Come on," Viyami said.

"Nice boyfriend you've got there," I said acidly as I started walking. "You really know how to pick a winner."

"I'm sorry," she said, suppressing a catch in her throat. "I'm so sorry, I didn't—"

"Save it. You chose your side."

"You don't understand," she said, trying to keep her voice low as she guided me towards the post the leader had indicated. "I wasn't the one who told them you went out. I didn't want to be there, but Mallek told me I had to come."

"And you always do what Mallek says."

Her hand tightened on my shoulder. "It's not like that."

"Really?" I said, devoid of patience and mostly wanting to lash out at someone. "What's it like, then? Because from where I'm standing, it's like you blocked our path and helped your friends capture me so that they could use me as bait to lure my wife here in order to torture and kill her. That seems pretty fucking cut and dried to me."

I couldn't see her face as she tied my wrists behind the tall log driven into the ground, but when she was done she came around to face me. Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with tears. Under the circumstances, I couldn't even begin to care how much sleep she was going to lose over what happened today. She ran her fingers through her dirty, short-cropped hair before replying. "I'm sorry," she said again. "They didn't give me any choice."

"We all have choices, Viyami," I said as I locked my eyes with hers and stared with utter contempt until she averted her gaze. "You made yours. Why don't you go think real hard about the kind of people you've decided to lie down with?"

I was spared having to listen to whatever she had to say in response to that. Someone in the camp whistled loudly, bringing the PK leader and a number of others running quickly out of the keep.

"What's the word?" said the leader as he jogged to a stop.

"I just got a message from one of our watchers," said the bandit who'd whistled. "The Valkyrie just left Taft. And she's by herself."


	16. Bait-and-Switch

"You've already lost, you know."

The killer studiously ignored me as he stood nearby, shading his eyes against the setting sun with the blade of his hand as he gazed out across the lake. I'd been trying to bait him for close to an hour, and it hadn't done much except to earn me a kick in the ribs. Since that didn't really do much except make him feel better and knock off a few points of health that eventually regenerated, I kept at it. If anyone had asked me, I couldn't have even begun to tell them why—I certainly didn't want to die, and I'd probably regret it if he actually lost his temper, but perhaps it was a way of avoiding an overwhelming sense of helplessness. I didn't want to admit that I was powerless to do anything to really strike out at my captor.

"Let's assume you kill me and Camilla in the worst possible way today," I went on. "Let's assume this goes exactly the way you expect it to. Big win, rah rah, _banzai_. You're still screwed."

He didn't turn, but I just barely saw his eyes shift towards me beyond the rim of his hood. "All right," he said with a small sound that might've been amusement. "Entertain me with why you think your deaths mean our defeat."

"Because Taft doesn't need us anymore," I said simply, staring directly up at him from my sitting position until he turned his eyes back to the lake. "The Army is patrolling the floor, and we've trained a militia from the players who live here. Getting rid of us can't take that away from them. You'll _never_ be able to go back to the kind of unopposed dominance you had before we arrived." Then I smiled as I sank the final barb. "And now everyone knows where you are. All they have to do is post guards on the western shore and wait for you to cross. You and your buddies might be able to take a big risk by sneaking in and out individually through the marsh, but you'll never be able to move bandits across the water in any number. You're done here."

The man laughed, crouching beside me where I sat with my hands tied behind the post and taking a fistful of my hair, shaking my head a little. "You naïve fool. You think that means we're _defeated_? All we have to do is slip out and port somewhere else. We already have what we came here for. And once your Rebecca is out of the picture too, as far as I'm concerned the Army can waste as much time as it wants patrolling this worthless floor."

I tried unsuccessfully to yank my hair out of his grasp with a jerk of my head. "You don't have any right to call her that."

"But it's such a pretty name," he said with a mocking tone, letting go and buffeting me on the side of the head with the heel of his palm. "And it flows so nicely in Japanese: _Rebeka_. Not like so many of those awful American names. You screamed it once when I stabbed her back on the first floor. I look forward to hearing you scream it again when she dies." When I didn't answer with anything but a gaze filled with smoldering hate, he taunted further. "What, no snappy rejoinder this time? Where's your wit and false courage now, boy?" He snorted in disgust as he stood.

If he was trying to get me to mouth off to him again, he'd picked the perfect way to provoke that reaction. "Enough with the 'boy' crap already, you pretentious jackass. I'm not one of these shithead teenagers you boss around; you can't be much older than me—if you even are."

The man's eyes burned as he stared down at me silently for a few beats. "Did you know that it's actually possible to cut out someone's tongue in this game?" he asked casually, as if he was inquiring after the score for last night's Lotte Marines game. "It doesn't hurt, of course, and like any dismemberment status it will regenerate after a few minutes… but it would quite effectively shut you up, and it seems like a _very_ unpleasant experience." A hint of a smile cracked his face. "I wouldn't know; I've never been on the _receiving_ end."

Silence seemed like the best answer to that particular question; I had absolutely no doubt that he would follow through on the threat, and was not especially eager to find out just how unpleasant it was. I watched and waited while he turned away and crossed the camp, talking with a trio of cloaked figures dressed similarly to him. They were facing away from me as they pointed across the lake and made other gestures I couldn't interpret, but I was willing to bet that they were part of his core "gang"—and possibly included those who were there in the first floor dungeon with us.

With no one nearby, I began to test my bonds. A few moments of wiggling confirmed my suspicions: Viyami had tied them loosely, the knots inadequately secured. As I felt my thumbs begin to slip through the loops, I relaxed and eased them back a little. If I made a break for it now, the best I could hope for was to make it to the lake or the marsh—the latter of which might as well be suicide. If I got at least a few seconds of breathing room, I might be able to equip some backup gear from my inventory. And then what?

Then what, indeed. No, I was only going to get one chance at this. I needed to make it count—and that probably meant saving it for when my wife got here, in the hopes that together we could pull off the impossible.

Looking around, I carefully counted everyone I could see. Not counting the four PKers who were huddled in conversation over by one of the tents, there were nine bandits in sight, equipped with the typical irregular patchwork of used equipment in poor repair. I knew there was one more sitting in the boat at all times, and three that were left on the far shore of the lake to wait for Camilla. I didn't see Viyami anywhere, so that meant at least one more not accounted for—if I numbered her amongst the enemy, which I was still inclined to do. Add in the PKers and call it at least fifteen on this side and three on the other. Eighteen in all.

Bad odds—especially for me; I had no remaining illusions about my effectiveness in PvP combat against multiple opponents. Camilla might make it out of this alive, provided none of the PKers used disabling status effects on her. I doubted I would.

But if it gave her a fighting chance at life, I was willing to accept that.

Once no one was looking in my direction, I slipped out a hand and opened my game menu. The mode that made it visible to other players wasn't a "sticky" setting, and I knew no one else would be able to see it. Working quickly, I navigated to my inventory, and scrolled down until I found one of my alternate daggers and could see it and a few random pieces of armor on the same screen without having to scroll. As I glanced over the top of the menu, I saw one of the bandits starting to turn my way and quickly put my hand back behind the post as if it was still tied, leaving my inventory hanging open in the air in front of me. It was a damn good thing that there was nothing behind the post other than the side of a tent; absent a close inspection it ought to conceal the fact that I was no longer secured.

There was nothing else to do but wait.

* * *

"She's here."

I'm not sure why I craned my head to look. From more than a kilometer away, there was no way I could see something the size of a person with any clarity, let alone recognize one. I could see dots that I assumed were people on the far side of the lake, but they could've been anything or anyone. As I watched, three bandits got into the boat with the oarsman and launched immediately, one of them taking up a second pair of oars and propelling the boat swiftly across the water towards the opposite shore.

As humiliating as it was to be sitting there in my underwear—and I was pretty sure that humiliation and demoralization was the entire point in not allowing me to at least re-equip a tunic or something—it did offer me something of an advantage, provided one was willing to stretch the definition of 'advantage' to include being ignored and dismissed as completely irrelevant by my enemies. Every now and then either the leader or one of his cloaked friends would glance in my direction to make sure I wasn't trying anything clever, but other than that their attention was entirely focused in the direction of the shoreline. Shouted orders occasionally made it to my ears as most of the bandits arranged themselves along the rocky beach and on the pier, and I had to suppress a laugh as one of them lost his footing on the slippery moss-covered rocks and took a hard fall. It didn't turn eighteen into seventeen, but it certainly lifted my spirits.

That morale boost was short-lived, however, as the leader eventually detached himself from the rest and returned in my direction. With the sun behind him, his entire face was in the shadow of his hood, and for a moment it gave him the aspect of a grim reaper. All he lacked was a scythe, and I was fairly certain he didn't need that piece of iconic equipment in order to harvest souls to make up for his lack of one.

"I thought you'd like to know," he said conversationally, standing directly in front of me with his arms concealed beneath the cloak, only his interlaced fingers showing in front of his belt. "The boat crew has your Rebecca in custody, and she's being ferried back across as we speak. It'll take perhaps five more minutes." He crouched at my feet, and with the sun almost as low on the horizon as it could get without dipping below the Weilan Mountains, I could see the smile of anticipation on his face just above where my menu still hung open in the air, unseen by him. The words that came next were in flawless English, which he knew perfectly well that I understood. "And then, my friend… it's showtime."

He was off by about five minutes.

At first I didn't recognize the clamor that arose from the southern end of the camp—there was nothing in that direction except Weilan Marsh, and it had been some time since I last heard anything like it. Then above the rising metallic chorus of heavy plate armor in motion came the sharper ringing of steel on steel and a shout of alarm—a shout which quickly turned to a cry that ended just as abruptly in the sound of shattering glass. Through the gaps between the tents I could catch glimpses of players in armor dashing towards the beach, and the PK leader was on his feet, head turning back and forth as he tried to get a handle on what was happening.

Whatever it was, I wasn't about to argue—it was the closest thing I was going to get to a chance. My hands whipped around from behind the post and I tapped several icons in my still-open inventory menu as rapidly as I could, basic clothing materializing on my body along with cheap leather boots and a cuirass. The dagger was in my hands almost as soon as it appeared at my side, and with all my strength I kicked out at the back of the leader's knee.

With all of his attention on the chaos that had broken out on the far side of the camp just moments before, the unexpected blow collapsed his leg beneath him and sent him toppling backwards. As he did, I reached up and grabbed the back of his cloak, yanking him down as I thrust the dagger up into his back. It wasn't a critical hit, but I had just enough time to see an appreciable portion of his HP gauge disappear before he twisted and drove his elbow into my face, slamming my head back into the post. There was an undignified scramble as we both got to our feet as quickly as we could, daggers in hand.

He didn't waste time on words, and neither did I. He was ready before I was, and a flare of angry red light was my only warning as a dagger skill shot him towards me. I leapt to one side, the crimson streak just barely missing me as I tucked my shoulder and rolled. I started getting my dagger into position before I'd even finished coming back up to my feet, and there was a flash and a crackling sound as both of our techniques went off at the same time, the blades deflecting off of each other and rebounding both of us slightly off-balance. He slashed at me as soon as his recovery freeze ended, tracing a line of red across my off-arm and leaving it briefly numb along one side.

We danced like that several more times, each of us trying to pull off dagger skills as quickly as we could. Strictly speaking, it wasn't _entirely_ impossible to deflect blows with a dagger-class weapon—but blocking and parrying in SAO was based on the weight and power of the weapon, and there simply wasn't much of anything in this world that didn't considerably outweigh a dagger. Even if you could somehow block an attack, most of the damage would soak through the defense and you'd stand a good chance of breaking your dagger.

However, this was the first time I'd ever seen two dagger users square off—let alone been a combatant in such a fight. We both landed grazing hits on each other occasionally, but every time we struck with a technique at virtually the same time it resulted in an opening that neither of us could really exploit, and it quickly became a game of timing. I pressed the attack as aggressively as I could, not wanting to give him the moments' respite that he'd need to equip a status tip which would leave me at his mercy. I could still hear the sounds of battle on the far side of the camp, but it somehow felt distant and irrelevant—as if my reality had narrowed to nothing but the opponent in front of me and the weapon in his hand. There was anger in his eyes now, and his arm blurred almost to the point where I couldn't follow it, a rapid series of stabs that I couldn't entirely avoid.

I knew my HP was dropping, but I couldn't even spare the moment of inattention it would've taken to look up and to the left at my HP gauge. I had never in my life felt so focused, so much in the immediate moment the way my wife always seemed to be—and occasionally it almost felt as if time itself would slow, and I could read the body language as my opponent got his dagger into the position for a skill that I recognized, giving me the split-second warning I needed to activate one of my own and guide its trajectory towards his attack just enough to defend against it.

As our dagger blades reflected off each other once again, I saw the leader's eyes widen momentarily as if there was something behind me. My first thought was that I wasn't going to fall for that trick, and I took a chance on launching my strongest multi-hit attack into that brief pause, praying that it would connect rather than leaving me open for the half-second it would take for me to unfreeze at the end. The man parried the first two strikes with blinding speed, but the third plunged through the cloak and sunk into his body; out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of green turning to yellow along the left side of his head.

It was a solid hit, but it wasn't anywhere near enough to finish him. I could feel my muscles lock up as the system assist completed its animation of my body, and that sense of time expanding seized me again, turning the half-second freeze of the recovery frame into something that seemed to stretch on for seconds as I waited for the rain of deadly blows that would come before I could move again.

But that wasn't what happened. Instead, there was a flapping sound of coarse fabric as the man's cloak seemed to detach from his body and flow over me almost as if he'd attacked me with it, momentarily blinding me and entangling my weapon hand in it. I heard what sounded like a skill activating, and I chose a direction at random, leaping backwards and feeling the system assist of the Acrobatics skill take over as I flipped back and landed in a crouch, the cloak flying free of me while I was in mid-air and fluttering to the ground off to one side.

He was gone.

I heard the pounding of boots behind me and whirled, heel swiveling on the ground as I held the dagger out in a position that would begin to charge a technique. But instead of bandits, I saw the last thing I'd expected on this side of the Marsh: a full party of players in Army gear charging in my direction, with what looked like two more parties in the background still fighting the bandits. Not wanting to be mistaken for one of the bandits in the heat of battle, I dropped the spare dagger and held up my hands in surrender, strength draining out of me as the adrenaline from my deadly duel began to ebb. My eyes widened in alarm as the plate tank at the head of the party showed no sign of stopping, and I quickly opened my mouth to identify myself and stave off what would be possibly the most ironic death in SAO to date.

But the attack that came was not the kind I'd expected. As soon as the party leader got close enough, she dropped her sword and grabbed me in a crushing hug, a very familiar laugh ringing out. I didn't even have time to be surprised as my wife flipped up the Army visor on her helmet and planted a kiss on my open mouth that very nearly made the entire ordeal worthwhile. When she set me down, I saw that the other players in her party had removed their helmets, revealing the nervously grinning faces of the Black Cats of the Moonlit Night.

Calling what followed a mop-up would be exaggerating things a bit. Once it became clear that the real PKers had fled and left them to die at the hands of the Army raid, most of the bandits that hadn't already surrendered threw down their weapons and practically begged to be captured. Those few that didn't do so immediately either had second thoughts after seeing their HP drop into the red, or—in a couple of unfortunate cases—were cut down where they stood. I took a moment to look over Camilla's shoulder and count heads, and decided that one or more of the Army players were going to have some soul-searching to do that night over the three lives that were ended. Like the bandit I'd killed in the swamp all those weeks ago, it had been completely justifiable—but I knew from experience now just how little comfort that was when you were lying in bed with your eyes closed and could still see the expression on their face before they died.

Camilla and her party, thankfully, didn't participate in that one-sided battle—she'd been focused on finding me and had been utterly delighted to discover that I didn't seem to need saving when she got there. She explained that the Black Cats had been there solely to inflate the apparent numbers in the raid and shock the bandits into surrendering; some of them barely had the strength to equip the Army-issued armor and wouldn't have been much good in a fight while wearing it. All in all, including my wife's party there had been eighteen players in the raid group. Against a ragged group of ill-equipped bandits who were taken by surprise and abandoned by their supposed ringleader, it had been more than enough.

"There's a few things I don't understand," I said once she'd finished giving me the abridged version of what they'd done. "First, how the hell did you clear your way through the Marsh so quickly, and with an incomplete raid group?"

Camilla's smile then was what the phrase _shit-eating grin_ had been coined to describe. She reached up and fingered a leather cord that hung around her neck, tugging at it until a familiar-looking disc-shaped amulet came free and settled down the front of her armor. Unbidden, the words flashed through my mind: _While equipped, Amphorics will remain neutral to the wearer and their party or raid members unless attacked first._

She must've mistaken the amazement on my face for confusion, because she immediately elaborated. "When all of your equipment suddenly showed up in our shared inventory, I figured they must've forced you to unequip everything." Her smug grin widened. "They kinda boned themselves on that one. Without this, you're right—we wouldn't have been able to make it through the Marsh in time, if we even could've at all. I guess you can have it back now."

I wished I could've said that I'd done that intentionally, but I'd simply used the _Unequip All_ option. The PK leader had said to take off everything, but he had only specified that I should drop my weapons and armor, and I hadn't been about to give up that rare quest reward if I didn't have to. As she tapped the item and unequipped it, returning it to our inventory, she went on. "You said 'a few things'? What else?"

I rubbed at my chin. "Well… they seemed awfully sure that you'd showed up alone and unarmed. The PK leader even told me they had taken you prisoner and were bringing you back on the boat. So if you were here with the raid… who did they actually capture?"

"Me," said another familiar voice from the direction of the lake. What I saw when I turned was enough to trigger a classic double take. The armor was instantly recognizable as my wife's, all the way down to the rare pauldrons on her shoulders, and the red hair that flowed down almost to those pauldrons was a match for hers as well. Anyone who only knew The Red Valkyrie by description would've instantly assumed it was Camilla. But I knew that voice, and I knew the face framed by that hair… and Parida was just a bit taller than my wife.

My jaw must've been hanging open, because her laughter was echoed by Camilla and most of the Black Cats. Parida grinned at me. "Sorry we took so long. You think they'll mind if I use one of these tents? I can't wait to get back into my own gear… and for that matter, back to the NPC stylist so I can get my old hair back."

"You do look much better with the braids," Camilla said, still laughing at my expression. "Come on, we can use this tent behind us to change; I want to get out of this Army crap myself." She glanced in my direction and gave me a sly look. "Would the dashing hero be so kind as to stand guard so that nobody peeks, or do you need some time to come to grips with how awesome we are?"

Finally managing to shut my mouth, I picked up my dagger and walked over to the entrance of the tent, holding the flap open for them. "_Douzo_."

"_Ookini_," Camilla replied in thanks as she and Parida slipped inside. Just when I was about to let the tent flap drop closed, my wife's head popped back out as if an afterthought had occurred to her. "You don't get to peek either."

I tried to look melodramatically disappointed. "You mean this wasn't all some elaborate plan to get me into a tent with two redheads? My birthday's coming up, you know."

It was probably for the best that the Army was still there—otherwise I might not have made it back to town alive after all.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you to all my readers for being so patient waiting for the next update! In addition to working on FDD, I also had some issues with the ending sequence I'd planned which I had to sort out first, and setting the story aside for a few weeks to think on it seemed like a good idea. There's one more chapter left in The Red Valkyrie (possibly two, depending on how long the wrap-up ends up needing to be), so I ask for your patience again and thank you for reading!


	17. Onward and Upward

None of us were looking forward to the long trek back to Taft, and after discussing the matter with Yurielle we decided to hitch a ride with the Army—so to speak. She had brought an item we'd never heard of before—something she called a Corridor Crystal—and used it to open a glowing portal directly to the cell blocks below Black Iron Castle. We stood off to one side as her squads marched the captured orange players through that gateway, and with each bandit that dejectedly stepped through I could almost imagine some kind of virtual gauge for the crime rate on the floor steadily dropping until it all but disappeared. Camilla and I were the last through the portal, and when the crystal in Yurielle's hand shattered, the glowing blue oval shrank until it disappeared with a sound of rushing wind that abruptly cut off.

There was some question of what to do about the green players who had been part of the bandit organization. Viyami had surrendered without any resistance when the Army raid arrived, but we all knew that there were more than a few unnamed others out there who'd acted as spies, lookouts and ringers. Aside from the challenge in identifying them, the main problem was that as far as the system was concerned, they weren't criminals—the prison code wouldn't keep them captive unless their cursor was orange, and it would be otherwise virtually impossible to hold them against their will without triggering the system's anti-harassment code.

What closed the matter—at least in Viyami's case—was my testimony. I explained to Yurielle how she'd risked her own safety to warn me that the bandits were planning a trap for us, and how she'd deliberately left my bindings loose so that I could escape. And if I played up her willingness to help a little bit while glossing over her moral failures… well, I figured enough lives had been ruined for one day.

Mallek had fought back, and ended up as one of the three killed during the raid. Whatever he'd been or become, I knew that there had once been something between them, and that Viyami had cared about him. It was hitting her hard; she moved like a hollow shell of a person, going where she was directed and sitting until she was told to move, rarely raising her eyes from the floor. I had to call her name twice to get her attention and tell her that she was free to go.

When my words finally registered, she nodded almost imperceptibly and pushed herself up to her feet, looking around the cathedral-like chamber that contained the Monument of Life. The massive stone slab that dominated the room drew her eyes, and even without looking closely I knew that she had to be searching for a particular name, looking for the double lines drawn through it that would prove to her that he hadn't somehow escaped; that he was never coming back.

"Thank you," she said, so quietly that it was only the absolute silence in the room that allowed me to hear.

"_Kocchi koso_," I said after a moment, acknowledging my own debt to her. "In the end, you made your choice after all. And that choice probably saved my life."

In the silence after I'd finished speaking, I heard a small choked-off sound from Viyami. I followed her gaze to a section of the wall where the _M_ player names began, and under the illumination of the full moon that filtered through the skylights I saw what she'd seen.

I glanced back over my shoulder; I could see Camilla and Parida hanging out and chatting under the archway that led out to the vast circular plaza where all of us had begun our adventures in this Death Game. My wife chose that moment to look in my direction, catching my eye and tapping her wrist in a gesture that almost felt anachronistic after months spent in a fantasy world. I nodded and held up one finger.

"I don't know what to do now," Viyami said in a voice so small it made me wonder just how old she actually was. "We were just supposed to play the game. And then… everything happened. And he protected me. Shielded me from the others. And now he's gone, and I don't know what…"

"Make a clean break," I said, interrupting her before she could get any more mired in self-pity. It wasn't that I couldn't sympathize with how she must be feeling, having lost her partner… but my sympathy was significantly attenuated by what an unmitigated shit Mallek had turned into; he'd nearly killed Parida in an excess of cruelty, and I wasn't inclined to forgive and forget on that one. "You're green and you're alive—and that's more than I can say for most of your _former_ companions. It's a chance to start over clean. Be your own person."

A short, sharp whistle came from the direction of the plaza; I didn't need to look to know who it was. Before I turned to leave, I simply added, "Maybe you'll find you like who she is."

When I rejoined the two women at the archway, Camilla inquired quirked an eyebrow at me. "What was that all about?"

"Pep talk," I said without elaborating, even after her other eyebrow went up and joined the first. "We ready to head back?"

Camilla's eyes abruptly shifted to the left, and she reached up and tapped at the air in front of her. "Well, we _were_… but I just got a message from Yurielle. Thinker wants a word with the two of us before we go."

Parida smiled. "I guess that's my cue. I need to go fix my hair and get back to Hinami anyway; I sent her a message but she's probably still worried."

"I can't thank you enough for your help, Parida," I said as she hugged each of us in turn. "I'm sorry for getting you into this, and for what happened—"

I stopped when I felt her shake her head, and then squeeze me briefly before letting go. "You're my friends. That's all that matters." She stepped back and smiled again, and this time there was a wet glint of moonlight around her eyes. "Come by the pub when you're done, okay? The Black Cats are going to celebrate, and I think everyone would be happy if both of you were there."

We agreed and watched for a moment as she jogged towards the warp gate in the center of the plaza. "So did Yurielle say what they wanted?" I asked.

Camilla shook her head, turning back to the monument and gazing at it as she spoke. "Just a request to come see them before we leave, downstairs where we first gated in."

"That's specific." I shrugged, falling in step as the two of us headed back into the castle. "Well, we kind of owe them. Let's see what they have to say."

But when we caught up with Thinker down in the cell blocks where the orange players were being secured, what he had to say after thanking us for our help was not quite what I'd expected. "We're pulling out of Taft," he explained. "Now that we've captured all of the criminals who were there except for the PKers you mentioned, there doesn't seem to be much need for us to linger. It's unfortunate that those four got away, but based on what you told us, it sounds like they have no further interest in the floor now that the bandit organization there is effectively destroyed."

"But again, thank you," Yurielle added as she rejoined Thinker at his side, all of the criminal players having been secured in their cells. "Training a militia from the players living on that floor has given them the confidence and organization they need to defend themselves. If bandits ever become a problem there again, I think the players of Taft will be able to handle it."

"In the meantime," Thinker said with a smile, "I'm going to have our people keeping closer tabs on the situation on the lower floors. These are the players who need our help the most—and not just with orange players. I'd like for us to be in a position to stop something like this from happening again _before_ it gets that bad."

"What will you do now?" Yurielle asked into the pause that followed.

Camilla and I looked at each other. "We haven't decided yet," I said. "But we do need to get back out in the field and start catching up on levels. We've got a strategy that's worked well for the last several months, and we lost a bit of time dealing with these guys." The last was accompanied by a gesture towards the hallway where the prison cells began.

Thinker nodded. "Well, our guild's doors are always open. Don't hesitate to reach out if you need help… or if you want to be part of what we're trying to do for all the players trapped in this world."

Both Camilla and I bowed to the two of them, a gesture that was returned respectfully in kind. As grateful as we were, I for one was eager to put the Army behind us, and so once we'd paid our respects we headed quickly for the warp gate and returned to Taft.

From what Parida had said, it sounded like we had a party to attend.

* * *

"_Kampai!_"

When Keita raised his glass, we all did. It was the third toast so far, and this one had been dedicated to freedom from fear. That even brought a smile from Sachi, who I gathered had practically been dragged along on the raid under the assurance—which thankfully ended up being true—that the Black Cats weren't actually going to have to fight. Now that the ordeal was over and the bandit threat had been driven from their floor, her spirits seemed to have picked up considerably. I even caught her joking with Sasamaru, which I counted as a good sign.

With no delivery of actual alcohol to the bloodstream, it was impossible to actually get drunk in SAO, but that didn't stop players from trying—nor did it stop Ducker from hamming it up when the game engine tried to simulate intoxication by blurring his eyesight and upsetting his sense of equilibrium. At one point I thought the kid was going to actually climb up on the table and try to dance; thankfully for the eyes and eternal souls of everyone present, Tetsuo had managed to yank him back down into his seat and get him under control. Camilla was laughing so hard that it was a good thing her avatar didn't need to breathe.

We had already expressed our thanks to Keita earlier for his part in the operation, but when the noise level in at the table reached a lull I felt the need to acknowledge the participation of the Black Cats as a group. "Seriously, thank you all. None of you had to do that, and even though you weren't there to fight, it took a lot of courage." When I said this last, my eyes lingered on Sachi, who averted her gaze to the table with a rosy tint of embarrassment on her cheeks.

Keita sipped at his drink and shook his head. "I was just happy we could help at all. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing lower-level players like us can do to contribute in this game. We read the same news everyone else does, hear all the stories of what the clearing groups are doing… but it's like they exist in another world. They don't seem to pay any attention to what's going on down here on the floors they've already cleared, or how the players who aren't as good as them are faring."

Camilla nodded. "It makes sense if you think about it, though… the clearers are focused on doing just that—pushing forward as hard as possible so that everyone can escape from this world. The more time they take away from that, the more time it will take for all of us to go home."

Keita's expression was uncomfortable. "Maybe. I guess I just can't help thinking that if the stronger players did a little more to help those who aren't as far along as them catch up, in the long run the number of players on the front lines could increase, and everyone would benefit."

I had to admit that he had a good point; from the look on her face my wife was probably having similar thoughts. We'd both been wrestling with our own guilt at playing it safe rather than pushing hard to level up and contribute to clearing the game, and I felt a moment of shame as I measured my own courage and ideals against Keita's. Even though they were lower in level than us, he still felt driven to strengthen his guild as much as possible and eventually make it to the front lines where they could contribute.

"If there's one thing I've taken away from the last few weeks," Keita went on, looking around at his guild members, "it's that there's more we could be doing. I know some of you have been wanting to move on to higher floors. And I know that's a scary thought for some others." I had a pretty good idea which was which; when I looked over at Sachi some of the cheer had drained from her face. "But I think it's time we faced our fears and pushed forward. I'd like for us to set a goal of moving up one floor a week so that we can start closing the gap."

"Don't take unnecessary chances," I cautioned him. "Levels can be gained, but lives can't be replaced."

Keita smiled, shaking his head. "Don't worry, we won't. We're just going to grind harder and stop hanging back on lower floors once they become too easy." He glanced between each of the Black Cats one by one, turning that smile on them. "I have faith in all of you. Every one." Then he directed his next words at us. "What about you two?"

Camilla glanced over at me. "Eighteen?"

It was one floor above the highest we'd tried hunting on yet; it seemed my wife was feeling driven to move on as well. "Eighteen," I echoed, steeling myself for the challenge to come.

Keita grimaced. "Way too high for us yet. But we'll get there. I promise." Forcing the grimace back into a real smile, he added: "And when we do, I hope you'll be kind enough to leave some mobs for us."

We both laughed and raised our glasses. Considering our habit of trailing after higher-level groups and cleaning up their repops, Keita's statement was rich in irony. "I think we can manage that," I said. "Let us know once you get to floor 18, okay? By then we'll know some good spots to grind there."

Keita lifted his glass in answer; the other Black Cats echoed the gesture—even Sachi, after a moment's hesitation. "We'll all see you there," he said with a grin. "Count on it."

As the night drew to a close, there were no prolonged goodbyes—we expected to be returning to Taft at some point in the coming weeks or months, if for no other reason than to have Parida's cooking again. But in the morning we would be off to the 18th floor—and a dedicated push to make it as far as we could, as safely as we could.

Aincrad's shine as a game world had worn off about two minutes into Kayaba's Death Game tutorial, but because of the degree to which game mechanics ruled our lives now, sometimes it was difficult to avoid seeing the world through the lens of a fantasy RPG. I knew that compared to the players who were out there on the front lines fighting to clear the game, we were nothing but side characters. We weren't the real heroes and never would be; if someone ever wrote a book about the fight to clear SAO after we all got out of here, I doubted our names would even come up.

But we'd done some good here in Taft. Maybe not as smoothly as we could have, and probably not in a way that would ever be significant to the high-level players in the clearing groups, but what we'd done had helped people and—in some small way—helped leave the floor a better place. We'd made friends, and made a difference.

Whether we liked it or not, until the game was cleared Aincrad was going to remain our reality—and at the rate the clearing was going, that promised to be a long time yet. There might not be anything we could contribute towards beating the game on the front lines. But perhaps there was still more we could do for those of us who had to live here in the meantime.

****  
おわり  
****

* * *

**Character Name**: Kadyn (ケイディン)  
**Real Name**: Seiji Midorikawa (緑川誓地)  
**Birthplace**: Chiba City, Chiba Prefecture (Japan)  
**Age**: 28 **Level**: 20

**Equipped Skills (in order unlocked)**:  
One-Handed Dagger (361)  
Searching (350)  
Leather Equipment (304)  
Acrobatics (80)

At age 16, Seiji was accepted as an overseas exchange student in a Los Angeles high school. While studying there he met a young girl named Rebecca Riley, who was in need of a Japanese conversation partner for the class she was taking. The two quickly discovered that they shared a mutual enjoyment of the same kinds of video games, and long before they graduated they had become an inseparable couple. After high school they moved to Seiji's native Japan together and married, spending their free time immersed in online games together and always playing as a team—to the point where they called each other by their longtime character names as much as or more than their real names. When Sword Art Online was announced, they tried and failed to enter the closed beta, but succeeded in becoming two of the unlucky ten thousand who were trapped in the Death Game on launch day.

Seiji prefers to play stealthy DPS classes, using tactical positioning and Rebecca's skill at tanking to flank the enemy and deliver critical blows at the right moment. While highly effective in PvE combat, in PvP he sometimes struggles against multiple opponents.

**Character Name**: Camilla (カミーラ)  
**Real Name**: Rebecca Midorikawa (緑川レベカ)  
**Birthplace**: San Francisco, California (USA)  
**Age**: 27 **Level**: 20

**Equipped Skills (in order unlocked)**:  
One-Handed Straight Sword (352)  
Shield Equipment (375)  
Heavy Metal Equipment (310)  
Parry (127)

Rebecca had been an obsessive online gamer since she was old enough to go on the Internet by herself, and when she met Seiji in high school she was serving as the main tank of a weekend raiding guild. She recruited her future husband to play an assassin class, and as the two spent more and more time playing as guildmates in the game and as conversation partners in real life, they knew that they were meant to be together. Sword Art Online was to be like a dream come true for her; she had always yearned for the day when technology would allow gamers to _live_ in the worlds they played instead of just watching them on a screen. Instead it became a nightmare in which she and her husband were trapped.

With her aggressive nature and nobility of spirit, as well as years of experience playing tank classes, Rebecca slipped naturally into a that role in SAO, and briefly made a name for herself on the lower floors as _Akavaru—_The Red Valkyrie—because of her confrontations with orange players.

* * *

**Afterword:** Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, and followed _The Red Valkyrie_! Your support is extremely motivational, and I'm sorry that you had to wait so long for the last few chapters.

To those of you who are looking forward to more of Kadyn and Camilla's adventures, rest assured that I have every intention of writing them. For the remainder of 2012 I'm going to be focusing primarily on _Fairy Dance of Death_, but provided I can maintain the writing inspiration, you can expect to see more stories about them in 2013.

Thanks again!

-Catsy


End file.
